Roll Tide! War Eagle! No matter their allegiance, all fans recognize the prevalence of concussions in football players. Last season, the NFL reported 271 concussions during the regular season, which is a 58 percent increase from the previous season.
Jessica Nichols, a Ph.D. student from the Floyd lab in UAB’s Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, explained how her research is making efforts to evaluate therapeutic options for treating concussions at the Discoveries in the Making event at Homewood Library on February 18, 2016.
Player Statistics
There are 2.5 million traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) reported annually, which is equivalent to 285 people having a TBI every hour of every day for the whole year. Concussions make up 75 percent of this total. Besides football players, TBI can also occur in cases of motor vehicle accidents, falls in older adults, trauma in members of the military, or domestic violence.
A concussion, or mild TBI (mTBI), can be defined as an external force that causes disruption of normal brain function. Nichols described this by telling the audience to “think of Jell-O in a bowl. The bowl is your hard skull and the Jell-O is your soft brain.” If you set the bowl down quickly, the Jell-O still moves, causing trauma. The primary trauma leads to more detrimental secondary injuries such as oxidative stress and neuroinflammation that contribute to cognitive, emotional, and behavioral impairments.
After three or more mTBIs, individuals are five times as likely to have cognitive impairment, three times as likely to be depressed, and 30 percent will experience increased sleep disturbances. There is also an increased risk of neurodegenerative disorders such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Last July, Ken Stabler, a University of Alabama alumnus and NFL player, passed away and his brain and spinal cord were donated to Boston University’s CTE Center. Other former football players’ brains also have been donated, with a startling 87 of 91 players, including Stabler, testing positive for CTE. With the current repeat concussion rate in the NFL of 26.7 percent, 50 players experiencing repeated mTBI (rmTBI) are at risk for developing CTE.
Coach’s Playbook
Current research is performed on post-mortem brains, but in order to develop effective therapeutics and decrease risk of CTE, researchers need to know the events occurring immediately after injury. Nichols and colleagues have developed a mouse model of rmTBI to tackle this problem.
Her first goal was to determine whether this model recapitulates the functional alterations observed in humans. She used different tests to assess learning, daily activities, and mobility, finding that mice experiencing rmTBI had difficulty learning, difficulties with normal activities, and decreased mobility during peak active hours, which is similar to what occurs in humans.
Because it is impossible to completely eliminate exposure to injury, therapeutics are needed to treat the secondary injuries following mTBI. Nichols has been evaluating the potential of an antioxidant compound to decrease markers of secondary injuries. She found that mice receiving this compound exhibited decreased markers of inflammation and oxidative stress following rmTBI, indicating the potential effectiveness of this compound.
Next Season
Nichols will continue her research by evaluating effects of treatment on behavioral alterations. She believes that these mice are providing insight that researchers will be able to use to develop effective therapeutics. Nichols closed with a question that summed up the goal of her research, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a treatment that athletic trainers could give to players on the sidelines or EMTs could give after a car accident?” Most would agree this would be exciting, indeed.