Non-athletes can also get traumatic brain injury

are looking for a relationship between repeated brain damage and persistent nerve damage, often studying the brains of soldiers or football players. But it's unclear whether the injury, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is widespread in the general population. Now, a new study reports this ratio for the first time.
for the study, kevin Bieniek, a neuropathologist who was working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues, classified nearly 3,000 brains donated to the clinic's tissue registry between 2005 and 2016. Then, by browsing obituaries and old yearbooks, the scientists narrowed the study to 300 athletes and 450 non-athletes engaged in physical contact.
ruled out all infants under the age of 1, brain samples with insufficient tissue, and brain donors without personal data. Finally, they collected some medical records and looked under a microscope for tissue in three parts of each brain for CTE symptoms. These symptoms include tau protein damage and build-up, a protein associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.
Bieniek and colleagues report in the journal Brain Pathology that 6 percent of the brains show some or all of the symptoms of CTE. At least according to their medical records, not everyone has CTE-related symptoms. These symptoms include anxiety, depression and drug use. However, people with CTE were 31 percent more likely to develop dementia and 27 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer's than those without CTE. People who engage in contact exercise are more likely to develop CTE symptoms. Nine percent of athletes have CTE symptoms, while non-athletes have just over 3 percent.
the highest rate of CTE was among high school football players - 10 out of 15 college and professional players showed certain characteristics of CTE or were diagnosed. The researchers found that football players were 2.6 times more likely to develop CTE than non-athletes, but more than 13 times more likely to have CTE than non-athletes for football players above high school.
parents need to know that kicking a shovel does increase the risk of CTE, and it's about how many years you've been playing. Chris Nowinski, chief executive of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, said, "This is an important message if we want to prevent this disease." The foundation is a Boston-based nonprofit that advocates for athletes to prevent concussions.
of the 273 female brain samples showed CTE symptoms. She is not an athlete. This may be because the average age of the subjects was about 67, Bieniek said. This means that before Section 9 of the Education Act, which prohibits gender discrimination in educational and school activities, became law in the United States in 1972, most of them were in their early 20s;
team also found that people with CTE were no more likely to be diagnosed with traumatic brain injury than those without CTE in the brain. The authors believe that repeated trauma is key to the development of CTE; a blow to the head can lead to concussions and their associated symptoms without the need for a CTE diagnosis.
experts say medical records may be incomplete and people don't always seek treatment for diseases such as depression and drug addiction. As a result, the results may underestimate the proportion of people with CTE who have these problems.
, a clinical neuropsychologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City who was not involved in the study, said the results provide a good overview of the prevalence of CTE in the general population. "So far, most studies of CTE have been conducted in highly selected populations, who usually have very high levels of exposure to head trauma."
Daniel Perl, a neuropathologist at the National Defense Medical University in Bethesda, Maryland, warned that many of the brains in the study showed only mild CTE symptoms and should not be confused with more extreme symptoms in the brains of professional football players. "I think we have to explain this and other similar studies very carefully." (Source: China Science Journal Zhao Xixi)
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