ABOVE: Scans of brain injury patients
N. GORGORAPTIS ET AL., SCIENCE TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE, 2019
Tau is a structural protein of brain cells that, in various neurodegenerative conditions and as a result of brain injury, can accumulate as tangled toxic deposits. Using a recently developed in vivo imaging technique, researchers have now examined such tau pathology in the brains of patients who, decades earlier, suffered a single head trauma. The results, presented in Science Translational Medicine last week (September 4), reveal not only that tau accumulation can remain unusually high in such patients, but also that tau abundance correlates with neuronal damage.
“It’s an important paper that links a single traumatic brain injury that occurred many years ago to long-term neurodegeneration,” says neuropathologist Thor Stein of Boston University who was not involved in the research. It also “looks at important biomarkers that can be detected in life and that will hopefully, down ...
