Single traumatic brain injury 'triggers Alzheimer's-like process'RSS Feed

A single brain injury could initiate or accelerate the onset of Alzheimer's disease-like neurodegeneration, even in young adults, new findings suggest.

Research published online in journal Brain Pathology found that traumatic brain injury survivors still show changes in their brains years after the incident took place.

Co-senior author Douglas Smith, of the Pennsylvania School of Medicine, noted that Alzheimer's-like plaques and tangles are appearing in the brain abnormally early in life and that this process appears to be triggered by a single traumatic brain injury.

"A single traumatic brain injury is very serious, both initially, and as we're now learning, even later in life," he stated.

This follows a study which revealed that sustaining a traumatic brain injury heightens the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease in later life.

Older war veterans who had experienced traumatic brain injury at some point during their lives were more than two times as likely to develop the neurodegenerative condition, according to the research by a University of California San Francisco team.

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Posted by Paul Breen
 

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