Researchers using new, enhanced imaging can now identify brain damage that occurs in professional football players following unreported concussions.

 

Concern has been growing in the NFL, other professional sports, and especially school sports that repeated, mild head impacts that often go unreported could eventually contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological ailments later in life.

 

There hadn’t been a diagnostic technique that could show such injuries. But now researchers from the Ben-Gurion University have demonstrated that a new diagnostic technique using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is able to identify significant damage to the blood-brain barrier (BBB) in the players, said Dr. Alon Friedman, the professor who discovered the technique.

 

Study participants included 16 football players from Israel's professional football team, Black Swarm, as well as 13 track and field athletes from Ben-Gurion University who served as controls.

All underwent the newly developed MRI-based diagnostic. Forty percent of the examined football players with unreported concussions had evidence of "leaky BBB" compared to 8.3 percent of the control athletes.

 

The study showed that such injuries did not affect all the players in the same way, so researchers are hoping the new imaging technique can be used to determine which players should not be allowed to return to the field, Dr. Friedman said.