Bernick said the more head trauma a person has the greater the risk of developing CTE, also known as dementia pugilistica.
“What we don’t know is if there’s a certain point of no return. The brain can tolerate so much and then if you go beyond that that’s when you’re going to run into this development of a disease process. So one question is to look at that and the second is: are changes occurring in the brain in these athletes even though they’re not having any symptoms?”
Taking a toll
The more than 100 boxers and mixed martial artists were divided into three groups, based on the number of years they’ve fought.
Bernick said, “So those that fought less than six years. Those that fought six to 12 years and then those that fought more than 12 years. And then we looked at each group top see if there was any relationship between the number of fights these guys had and changes either in the size of certain areas of the brain or their performance on tests of reaction time, memory and so on.”
The first year of the study yielded results regarding brain size.
“In those that have fought for greater than six years, the more fights they had there seemed to be shrinkage in certain areas of the brain that we can measure. However, it was only in those that had fought more than 12 years that we started to see the performance changes. This would suggest two things. One, again, there may be a threshold. That is, the brain may be able to accommodate a certain amount of head trauma and then if you exceed that you actually can start seeing shrinkage occur in the brain. But that occurs actually many years before you even start having symptoms,” he said.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25