A new PET scan approach may pave the way to better diagnosis of traumatic brain injuries in the living, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — commonly known as "football brain".

In a presentation at the recent 6th Annual Traumatic Brain Injury Conference in Arlington, Va., Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine's Dr. Samuel Gandy presented a case of an ex-player whose "dramatic image" showed CTE. The image was just published as part of a commentary in the journal Current Research: Concussion.

The unnamed player, whose dramatic scan was shown to the meeting, has CTE signs that might have otherwise been too subtle to notice until autopsy. The scan, said Gandy, "outlined the celci very nicely." The region of the brain is one in which previous studies have shown those with CTE had abnormal Tau deposits on autopsy.
“He functions, runs a business, but his symptoms are primarily psychiatric,” Gandy revealed to the New York Daily News. “He’s irritable and has trouble controlling rage.”

The new scan makes use of cutting edge ligands, the still-to-be FDA-approved T807, to make brain changes visible on the images. Although the research, conducted with colleague Dara Dickstein, Ph.D., is preliminary, he and other researchers believe it is extremely promising. The agent was created by Siemens and later acquired by Avid Pharmaceutic, stated the News.

In the conclusion of their commentary, the researchers stated that, while imaging with these new agents is still in its early days, "both the need and interest are intense, and we anticipate that there will be substantial progress toward in vivo diagnosis of CTE over the coming few years."

Boston University's Robert Stern, who has been at the forefront of the search for tools to diagnose CTE in the living, thinks that there will be a "huge" impact from new agents like T807, which he has also used in his research. “We want to be able to detect it really early, so we can intervene, slow it down or stop it in its tracks," he told the daily paper.

The NFL had refused to fund a study of Stern's last year, as part of the growing controversy over the league's handling of brain injury related to the sport.

Stern and fellow researchers, in fact, have now received NIH funding for a 7-year study of 120 ex-NFL and 60 ex-college players in an effort to find better ways to catch incipient CTE so that those affected can alter their lifestyle before its too late. "Once there’s brain damage from the disease, you can’t get that tissue back,” he told the paper.

That funding support provoked a congressional investigation, according to the News.

HCB News previously reported on a diffusion tensor MR study, presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 68th Annual Meeting starting April 15 in Vancouver, Canada, that shows that over 40 percent of retired NFL players show signs of traumatic brain injury.

“This is one of the largest studies to date in living retired NFL players and one of the first to demonstrate significant objective evidence for traumatic brain injury in these former players,” Dr. Francis X. Conidi, the study's author, said in a statement. “The rate of traumatic brain injury was significantly higher in the players than that found in the general population.”

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