From football to flies: Lessons about traumatic brain injury
From: ECN - 10/15/2013

Faced with news of suicides and brain damage in former professional football
players, geneticist Barry Ganetzky bemoaned the lack of model systems for
studying the insidious and often delayed consequences linked to head injuries.

Now a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Ganetzky
is studying traumatic brain injury (TBI). He and David Wassarman, a UW
professor of cell and regenerative biology, report this week (Oct. 14) in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the first glimpses of the
genetic underpinnings of susceptibility to brain injuries and links to human
TBI.

TBIs occur when a force on the body jostles the brain inside the head,
causing it to strike the inside of the skull. More than 1.7 million TBIs
occur each year in the United States, about one-third due to falls and the
rest mainly caused by car crashes, workplace accidents, and sports injuries.
TBIs are also a growing issue in combat veterans exposed to explosions.

In many cases, the immediate effects of TBI are temporary and may seem mild —
confusion, dizziness or loss of coordination, headaches, vision problems. But
over time, impacts may lead to neurodegeneration and related symptoms,
including memory loss, cognitive problems, severe depression, or
Alzheimer's-like dementia. Together TBIs cost tens of billions of dollars
annually in medical expenses and indirect costs such as lost productivity.

Though TBIs can be classified from "mild" to "severe" based on symptoms,
there is a poor understanding of the underlying medical causes.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.ecnmag.com/news/2013/10/football-flies-lessons-about-traumatic-brain-injury

Source:
From football to flies: Lessons about traumatic brain injury
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/uow-fft101113.php

Links:
Frontline: League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis (with video 1:53:41)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/league-of-denial/