Protein Pattern in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Identified

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is an acquired primary tauopathy with a variety of cognitive, behavioral, and motor symptoms linked to cumulative brain damage sustained from single, episodic, or repetitive traumatic brain injury (TBI). No definitive clinical diagnosis for this condition exists. 

In this work, we used [F-18]FDDNP PET to detect brain patterns of neuropathology distribution in retired professional American football players with suspected CTE (n = 14) and compared results with those of cognitively intact controls (n = 28) and patients with Alzheimer’s dementia (AD) (n = 24), a disease that has been cognitively associated with CTE.

READ FULL ARTICLE From Pnas