A new study published in the journal Radiology has uncovered a clue as to why mild traumatic brain injuries (MTBI) can result in long-term consequences, FOX News reports, as researchers found that white matter damage in the brain of who had experienced concussions closely resembles the type of damage found in patients with Alzheimer's disease.
The findings of the new study suggest that concussions set off a neurological events which can result in long-term brain damage.
"It's not the hitting your head that's the problem. It's everything else that happens after that," lead study author Dr. Saeed Fakhran, assistant professor of radiology in the Division of Neuroradiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said to FOX News.
When people typically experience a concussion, CT and MRI scans of their brains appear normal, and according to Fakhran, this is why doctors have largely remained in the dark surrounding the phenomenon of brain damage occurring afterwards. Fakhran and his colleagues collected data from 64 MTBI patients with a mean age of 17 and 15 control patients. Thirty-nine percent of patients had suffered a prior concussion and two thirds had suffered a sports-related concussion.
"We used something called diffusion tensor imaging, which is a subset of MRI looking at just the white matter," Fakhran said. "It looks at areas where your white matter is injured."
Researchers used their findings of white matter injuries to the brain to hypothesize that a chain of neurological events is set off after a person hits their head, which might result in long-term damage to the brain.
"Most people will tell you if you hit your head, you get a concussion, and the damage comes from the act of hitting your head," Fakhran said. "[But] maybe the hitting your head is lighting the fuse and the damage comes from a neurodegenerative cascade [afterwards]."
Franklan said that if doctors can find a way to stop the chain of damage from occurring, they may be able to lessen the severity of the injuries and their side effects. A subset of patients in the study suffered from sleep-wake disturbances, which can disrupt sleep and cause memory problems, social dysfunction and decrease the quality of a patient's life. Fahkrain noted that sleep-wake disturbances is one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease.
"Hitting your head is lighting the fuse. If you lit the fuse and I blow it out, you just have a bruise, no damage done. But if you don't, then it gets down to the bottom and explodes. To me the explosion is Alzheimer's," Fakhran said.
