TBI Study: A Single Injury May Double Dementia Risk

A major new study finds that people who suffer just one traumatic brain injury face significantly higher risk of developing the protein plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer's disease. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the University of Glasgow, UK, compared postmortem brains from 39 long-term TBI survivors to uninjured, age-matched controls. Choice quote from the Penn news release:

A single traumatic brain injury is very serious, both initially, and as we're now learning, even later in life," said Douglas Smith, MD, professor of Neurosurgery and director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, the study's co-senior author. "Plaques and tangles are appearing abnormally early in life, apparently initiated or accelerated by a single TBI."

Read the original paper, "Widespread Tau and Amyloid-Beta Pathology Many Years After a Single Traumatic Brain Injury in Humans," in the journal Brain Pathology. The authors also presented their findings earlier this week at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC) in Paris. Watch a short summary interview with chief medical and scientific officer William Thies, PhD.



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