New Scan Detects Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy In Living Brain

On behalf of Lovett Law Firm posted in Brain Injury on Friday, December 6, 2013.

It’s only been a little over ten years since researchers discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disorder usually caused by repeated blows to the head. Most commonly found in football players, the condition was only identifiable by looking at the brain of a deceased victim. But diagnosing the condition after the fact troubled doctors who knew that an earlier diagnosis could mean earlier treatment as well. With the help from researchers at UCLA, physicians may finally have a way of diagnosing the degenerative brain disease sooner and hopefully many of the symptoms associated with CTE.

Scientists at UCLA have developed a radioactive dye that, when given to a patient intravenously, reacts with a specific protein associated with CTE. When run through a PET scan, the dye illuminates, alerting a physician to the presence of the disease. The researchers say they will need to test the scan on more football players before coming to an absolute conclusion about the scan but say that the results so far are incredibly promising.

As readers of our blog here in Texas know, even a single brain injury can be a life-changing event.  It can cause a person to lose their memory, have difficulty speaking and can even affect a person’s emotions as well.  Worst of all, repeated injuries to the head can even result in death.  With the help of the new scanning method, doctors will be able to catch this disease before it becomes progressively worse, and because the procedure only takes about an hour to perform, doctors may be able to test after every brain injury to see how the injuries are actually affecting a person’s brain over the course of time.

Source: The MIT Technology Review, “Identifying Signs of Chronic Brain Injury in Living Football Players,” Susan Young, Dec. 6, 2013