Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has typically been connected to head injuries, specifically those suffered by athletes in contact sports. However, researchers found that it is also linked to DNA damage that’s similar to the kind seen in Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers analyzed hundreds of neurons from postmortem brain tissue samples of 15 people diagnosed with CTE, as well as four who had repeated head impact but no CTE. These were compared with 19 “neurotypical” controls and 7 individuals with Alzheimer’s.
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What researchers found was that those with postmortem CTE diagnoses had “specific abnormal patterns of somatic genome damage” resembling those seen in Alzheimer’s. Those who had repeated head impact but not CTE didn’t show the same patterns, though, a press release for the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science, stated.
Frozen human brain tissues were taken from the UNITE Brain Bank at Boston University; the Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the National Institutes of Health Neurobiobank at the University of Maryland Brain and Tissue Bank.
This work comes after research was published in Nature by Jonathan Cherry and Ann McKee at Boston University showing repeated head impact causes brain damage in young people, though only some go on to develop CTE.
“Our results suggest that CTE develops through some process in addition to head trauma,” the study’s co-author Christopher Walsh, the HMS Bullard Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology and chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s, said in a statement. “We suspect it involves immune activation in a way similar to Alzheimer’s disease, happening years after trauma.”
Walsh told CNN that cells “carry a bar code of their whole developmental history including reflecting environmental influences, and that’s what’s happening in CTE.
“The abnormal environment created by the repeated trauma damages the genomes of the cells,” he said.
