Study: Strong link between contact sports and Parkinson’s disease

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The largest study to date on chronic traumatic encephalopathy has revealed a new link between playing contact sports and the development of the movement disorder known as Parkinson’s.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a degenerative brain disease whose only known cause is repeated blows to the head, such as those that occur in contact sports.

A previous study by the same research team in 2018 found that duration of contact sports was associated with an increased risk of Lewy body disease. However, the current study is the first to describe the relationship between participation in contact sports, brainstem disease, and Parkinson’s disease in CTE.

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and Parkinson’s

The study of 481 deceased athletes by researchers at Boston University School of Medicine Chobanian and Avedissian and University of Virginia Boston Health Care, published July 15 in JAMA Neurology, found that most people with CTE also had Parkinson’s disease, and that CTE appears to be the cause of Parkinson’s symptoms in most cases.

Parkinson’s disease is a condition characterized by symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease, such as tremors, abnormal slowness of movements, and abnormal stiffness in the arms or legs, and has long been associated with brain injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy in boxers. However, the specific pathology underlying these symptoms in CTE has been unknown.

Parkinson’s disease is classically associated with the buildup of proteins called Lewy bodies in brain cells, but researchers have found that 76 percent of people with CTE and Parkinson’s do not have Lewy body disease.

“We were surprised to find that most of the people with CTE and Parkinson’s did not have Lewy body disease,” said Thor Stein, MD, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Boston University and Virginia Health Care, and one of the researchers responsible for the study.

“Instead, people with Parkinson’s were more likely to have CTE-related brain cell death in a region of the brainstem important for movement control,” he added.

Study of patients’ brains

The people in the study donated their brains to a private brain bank to understand neurological injuries and traumatic encephalopathy. People with Parkinson’s were compared with those without the disease to identify types of disease that might explain why some people with the disease develop these symptoms and to examine relationships with the duration of contact sports.

“The severity of CTE has been shown to be associated with longer duration of play, and in this study we found that eight additional years of contact sports were associated with a 50% increased risk of more severe disease in a specific area of ​​the brainstem that controls movement,” said Daniel Kirsch, a doctoral student in medicine at Boston University and one of the study’s researchers.

The study highlights the importance of understanding the long-term effects of repeated head impacts, and the need for preventive measures in contact sports to reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy and Parkinson’s disease.