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Researchers have found that tau protein levels detected on brain scans of living people may serve as a biomarker of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease that has been linked to repeated head trauma. Although years off, a diagnostic that uses such biomarkers could give patients a warning about the associated cognitive, mood, and behavioral issues they may endure, and perhaps give doctors a chance to levy interventions to ward off the symptoms of CTE, which is currently only able to be diagnosed by brain examinations postmortem.
In a study published Wednesday (April 10) in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers at Boston University, a leader in CTE research, used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to assess levels of the tau protein in 26 living former NFL players who have started to experience cognitive difficulties and in 31 similarly aged male controls. They found that ...
