Our second weekend in the program, we went to a rugby match between Upstarts Castres and Montpellier at the Stade de France. This was a new experience for me, because I rarely go to many sporting events and it was my first time ever watching rugby. There were enthusiastic fans everywhere starting from the metro station all the way to the stadium. Our assignment was to choose a player and count how many times they potentially had a head impact. When the game started, I realized that this was much harder to count than I thought. When the players were hit, there would be so many players in that area at once, making it hard to actually see who was actually hit and who was not. It was also hard to keep track of the same player throughout the course of the game. In the end, everyone made their best guesses and we calculated a class average of around 12 hits throughout the game.
Figure 1. Janet, Coco, and I at the rugby match.
Watching the game made we wonder how the brain physically changed after head injuries. After a quick pubmed search, I found a study called “Analysis of Functional Pathways Altered after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury” by Redell et al. (2013). These researchers used a rat model to investigate molecular pathways that were activated after focal and diffused injury in the brain. They were interested in these pathways because they may contribute to neurocognitive deficits that occur after mild traumatic brain injury. Their results showed that an acute inflammatory response was a common feature in both mild controlled cortical impact, which is a focal injury, as well as fluid percussion injury, which is a diffuse injury. They measured inflammation through biomarkers of mild traumatic brain injury, such as UCHL1 and GFAP. Redell et al. (2013) suggested that the inflammatory pathways could be targeted when developing therapeutic strategies.
Figure 2. CT scan of a patient with traumatic brain injury. (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/26-y-o-patient-with-traumatic-brain-injury-A-CT-scan-only-shows-impression-fracture-and_fig1_275256919)
This study shows that even mild traumatic brain injury can have physiological consequences in the brain. Therefore, strategies need to be developed to protect rugby players as well as other types of athletes from such a high frequency of potential injuries to the brain.
References:
Redell, J., Moore, A., Grill, R., Johnson, D., Zhao, J., Liu, Y., & Dash, P. (2013). Analysis of functional pathways altered after mild traumatic brain injury. Journal of Neurotrauma., 30(9), 752-764.