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As many as 3.8 million people sustain sports- and recreation-related concussions each year in the US, but diagnoses of these brain injuries remain challenging. In a study published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researchers describe a saliva-based test that accurately detected concussions in male rugby players.
“What’s exciting about this is we not only found a very accurate way of identifying brain trauma, but also we found it in saliva, which is not invasive,” Antonio Belli, a trauma neurosurgery researcher at the University of Birmingham in the UK and a coauthor of the study, tells The Washington Post. “Everybody, including myself, has been looking at blood for many years. We’ve never really seen anything so exciting for mild traumatic brain injury.”
The test measures expression levels of 14 small noncoding RNAs in saliva, including microRNAs. “MicroRNAs are messages the cells transmit in ...
