Dana Foundation Blog

Spreading the Word about CTE

Chris Nowinski was in New York City late last week to join 1,200 former football players gathering for the Ivy Football Association (IFA) dinner at the Marriott Marquis. Earlier in the day, he and a group met for an informal breakfast at the Harvard Club in midtown,
where I met Chris and got a sense of his back-breaking schedule. At both events, there was considerable buzz about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a long-term degenerative and incurable brain disease caused by repeated hits to the head—mild or otherwise.

Cerebrum, the Dana Foundation’s online neuroscience journal, had invited Chris to write about CTE. His recently posted story, “Hit Parade: The Future of the Sports Concussion Crisis,” couldn’t have been timelier. In the two weeks leading up to our publication date, a new study had been released, several Super Bowl participants had talked about the implications of CTE in their own lives, and President Obama had expressed his own concern in a magazine interview. As senior editor of Cerebrum, I told Chris how much I appreciated his keeping us current and updating our story.

From the Archives: Progress in Brain Injury Awareness

Soldiers returning from war with visible head injuries are easy to spot, but what about soldiers—and civilians of all ages—who have brain injuries but no external wound?

In a Cerebrum piece for us in 2008, "A Wound Obscure, Yet Serious," traumatic brain injury (TBI) specialist Wayne Gordon, Ph.D., noted that these cases of unidentified TBI were far more prevalent than people realized and offered suggestions for better awareness and treatment. He writes:

"We must develop a good way to screen for brain injury. Community agencies, health care service providers and other organizations should screen populations that are known to be at risk, such as schoolchildren, abused women, athletes, people receiving social support services, and members of the military. Similarly, within medical contexts, people who have experienced a non-brain physical trauma, such as a fall from a ladder, also should undergo screening as a precaution."

Neuroscience and Society: Traumatic Brain Injury

Whether in the context of sports or the military, stories about traumatic brain injuries have become more frequent over the past several years as attention given to these injuries has grown. In October 2012 the AAAS and the Dana Foundation held a joint event on current TBI research and potential treatments, as part of their public series Neuroscience and Society.

Speakers at the event included Capt. James L. Hancock, M.D., Deputy Commander of Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, who suffered a traumatic brain injury while serving in Afghanistan, and researchers Col. Jeffrey Ling, M.D., Ph.D., and Dana Alliance member Ann McKee, M.D.

Neurosurgery Before Neurosurgery

For most modern folk, it is difficult to embrace how neurosurgery existed well before anesthetization, asepsis, and cerebral localization—three techniques that arrived in the last century and a half. Perhaps the thought of early renaissance doctors boring into your skull with a hand drill while you actively participate in the operation is unsettling for today’s pampered patients. Well, I am here to drill holes in your preconceived notions about the history of neurosurgery with the help of Eugene S. Flamm, M.D., who presented “Neurosurgery Before Neurosurgery: The Formative Years 15-17-1867” last Thursday at Columbia University.

New Brain-Trauma Study Makes Big Splash

Ann McKee, MD, a professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University School of Medicine and a Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives member, was featured earlier this week on The News with Brian Williams on NBC-TV. McKee was interviewed in a segment that focused on new findings in a four-year study that links head trauma to long-term degenerative brain disease.

The study is the most comprehensive to date on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Its findings were based on study of the donated brains of 85 people, 80 percent men (68), nearly all of whom played sports. Asked if she would allow her own children to play football, McKee, a mother who grew up as a diehard Green Bay Packers fan, responded: “It’s a really tough question for me. I really don’t know.”