Young athletes sustain hundreds of head impacts during a season of football. Although they don’t always lead to concussions, the brain changes are measurable after just a single season, according to a new study published online in the journal, Radiology.

About three million youths play organized tackle football in the U.S., according to USA Football. Most studies investigate the changes in the brain as a result of concussion, but the researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina decided to take a different approach.

The research team evaluated 24 male youth football players between ages eight and 13. They used the Head Impact Telemetry System (HITs) to record head impact data and then determined the risk-weighted cumulative exposure associated with a single season of football.
Each player underwent diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) with an MR scanner both before and after the season. In addition, all of the games and practices were video recorded and reviewed to confirm the accuracy of the impacts.

DTI generates fractional anisotropy (FA), which is a measurement of the movement of water molecules in the brain and along nerve fibers in the white matter. The direction of water movement is reasonably uniform and measures high in FA in healthy white matter, but brain abnormalities are associated with lower FA values and random water movement.

The team found that there is a significant connection between head impacts and lower FA in certain white matter tracts and tract terminals where white and gray matters meet. Similar changes have been found among patients with mild traumatic brain injury.

DTI is commonly used to assess concussion patients as well. Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System published a study in June that used DTI to detect whether a concussion patient will ever fully recover.

Predicting which patients will have a good or bad prognosis can help to discover and evaluate treatments for concussions. It also allows the researchers to test potential therapies on the concussion patients who can actually benefit from them.

The Wake Forest researchers mentioned that none of the players showed any signs of concussion and that they don’t know if the findings indicate any potential long-term outcomes. The changes in the brain may resolve with little consequence, but more research is needed to understand what the brain changes could mean in the long-term.

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