DTI Detection of Longitudinal WM Abnormalities Due to Accumulated Head Impacts

Abstract

Longitudinal evaluation using diffusion-weighted imaging and collision event monitoring was performed on high school athletes who participate in American football. Observed changes in white matter health were suggestive of injury and found to be correlated with accumulation of head collision events during practices and games.

A preliminary longitudinal study of white matter alteration in cocaine use disorder subjects

“…There exist longitudinal DTI studies that investigated topics other than CocUD, such as head injury (Murugavel et al, 2014; Chun et al, 2015; Edlow et al, 2016), cognitive training (Engvig et al, 2012), and virus infection (Tang et al, 2016). Among these studies, Engvig et al (2012) used TBSS to investigate changes in white matter microstructure within ten weeks, and thus is methodically similar to the present study.…”

Collegiate women's soccer players suffer greater cumulative head impacts than their high school counterparts

“…The sensors were sensitive enough to collect low acceleration events (10-20 g) for hard stops, cuts, and hard kicks. Given that these events are assumed to be unlikely to result in deleterious neurophysiological changes (e.g., there are no reports of sprinters experiencing abnormally high rates of neurological disorders), our analysis on head accelerations was limited to those events surpassing 20 g. It should be noted, however, that any threshold selection will remain somewhat arbitrary until neurophysiological or neurocognitive-based assessments are merged with data sets such as the one described here (Breedlove et al, 2012;Chun et al, 2015;Nauman et al, 2015;Poole et al, 2015;Robinson et al, 2015).…”

Accumulation of high magnitude acceleration events predicts cerebrovascular reactivity changes in female high school soccer athletes

“…From the perspective of severity, late life cognitive and structural abnormalities have been shown to be exacerbated by the onset of this cumulative exposure before the age of twelve in retired NFL athletes exhibiting Many neuroimaging biomarkers have proven to be sensitive to brain changes occurring in asymptomatic athletes during, and subsequent to, periods of exposure to repetitive head trauma (Koerte et al 2015). These biomarkers include taskbased FMRI (Talavage et al 2014;Shenk et al 2015), diffusion-weighted imaging measures (Bazarian et al 2014;Davenport et al 2014;Chun et al 2015;Bahrami et al 2016;Davenport et al 2016;McAllister et al 2014;Lipton et al 2013), MR spectroscopic measures of brain metabolism (Poole et al 2014), resting-state functional connectivity as assessed using FMRI (Johnson et al 2014;Abbas et al 2015a;Abbas et al 2015b;Slobounov et al 2017), global measures of cerebral blood flow (Slobounov et al 2017) and also measures associated with microhemorrages as obtained from susceptibility weighted imaging (Slobounov et al 2017). Further, it appears that many of the deviations observed in these biomarkers are a function of the longitudinal accumulation of HAEs during the season (Robinson et al 2015;Breedlove et al 2012;Poole et al 2015;Talavage et al 2014;Talavage et al 2015).…”