Years Later
The results of a seemingly minor to moderate head injury are not usually thought to be deadly. Recent reports indicate that the impact of head injuries, and especially concussions, are perhaps more serious long term than we had thought them to be. Most dangerous of all is an occupation/hobby that often has repeated concussions, like a boxer or a football player. Head trauma has been found to be associated with a motor neuron disease. Repeated blows to the head may cause nerve degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease. The nerve damage acts like a domino effect, one nerve is damaged and others follow.
Autopsies of 12 athletes who died with brain or neurological disease showed a distinctive pattern of nerve damage -- and fingered some potential culprits.
All had repeated concussions during their careers. Three of the men had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, the star baseball player who died of it.
Experts in brain injury said the study, published in the Journal of Neuropathology & Experimental Neurology, pointed to new areas of research and possible ways to prevent long-term damage from concussions.
"If you could somehow give a person a drug, you could potentially prevent an illness like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis," Dr. Jeffrey Bazarian of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York said in a telephone interview.
The findings also point to an urgent need to watch veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom suffer brain injuries from explosions, accidents and blows to the head from other causes, the experts said.
"This is the first pathological evidence that repetitive head trauma experienced in collision sports might be associated with the development of a motor neuron disease," Dr. Ann McKee of Boston University School of Medicine and colleagues wrote in the report, available at http://link.reuters.com/fab65n.
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