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Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Tracking Repeated Concussion Injuries Among NFL players with PET Scans

A wide variety of tests can be used to determine if a patient has brain injury, and PET (positron emission tomography) is one of them. PET scanning technology relies on the fact that the brain stores glucose, and by tagging the glucose inside the brain with a radioactive tracer, the PET scanner can identify the areas of the brain where glucose is underutilized.

With PET scans being a useful imaging tool for brain injuries, experts now believe that it can be an indispensable tool in monitoring the brains of NFL players and athletes in other contact sports. Recently, scientists discovered that they can use PET scans to look for brain injury and repair markers in the brains of active and retired NFL players.

According to Jennifer Coughlin, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, the scientists believe that in PET scans, they have “a useful tool to monitor the brains of NFL players and athletes in other contact sports.”
Coughlin, along with her fellow researchers, published a research that used PET scan to measure translocator protein (TSPO), a biomarker of brain injury that was visible through PET scans. The research involved 23 PET imaging data from 11 men who had never had concussion and 12 NFL players, both active and retired. By tracking TSPO, Coughlin believes that they can monitor if the brain is healing from an injury or not.

Coughlin says that it is important to track a brain injury because repeated concussions among athletes have the potential to lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition associated with poor memory, confusion, and dementia.

Researchers like Coughlin are constantly looking for better techniques to observe the living brain, along with its functions and conditions. Thanks to PET scans, clinicians can monitor the development of CTE, whereas before the condition could only be diagnosed at autopsy.

Source:


Can PET scans track concussion injuries in NFL players?, Futurity.org

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