How Football Hits Could Lead To An Immune Attack On The Brain
Head To Head From the Centers of Disease Control and PreventionWe take a look at a new idea about head injuries in football. There's plenty of evidence that repeated head hits in football-even if they don't quite cause concussions-are associated with neurological problems later in life. Yet what exactly happens in the years between a hit and the appearance of symptoms such as memory loss and depression? What exactly causes the symptoms, and how might medicine prevent them? One group of researchers has a new idea. Sub-concussive jostling to the brain could lead to a series of events that ends with cells in the immune system attacking the brain, says Jeffrey Bazarian, a physician at the University of Rochester Medical Center and a co-author on a new study about brain injury as an autoimmune response. The study was preliminary and wasn't set up to prove that immune cells are harming the...