Study Finds Key Details About 'Punch Drunk Syndrome' and Alzheimer's

A study of the damaged brains of boxers and other athletes published in Nature uncovered key details about the head injury-linked disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), or "punch drunk syndrome," that could help the development of new diagnostics and treatments for Alzheimer's, reports Reuters . CTE causes a type of dementia similar to Alzheimer's, which can currently only be identified postmortem. CTE also bears similarity to Alzheimer's because it entails the abnormal accrual of certain proteins in the brain, including tau. The researchers excised tau filaments from the brains of deceased athletes, then imaged them via cryo-electron microscopy. Although the tau's atomic structures from subjects with CTE were identical, they also differed from those seen in Alzheimer's. "Our new knowledge of these structures could make it possible to diagnose CTE in living subjects by developing tracer compounds that will specifically bind to the tau filaments of CTE," said Michel Goedert at Britain's Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology.