What boxing tells us about repetitive head trauma and the brain

Boxing and other combat sports may serve as a human model to study the effects of repetitive head trauma on brain structure and function. The initial description of what is now known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was reported in boxers in 1928. In the ensuing years, studies examining boxers have described the clinical features of CTE, its relationship to degree of exposure to fighting, and an array of radiologic findings. The field has been hampered by issues related to study design, lack of longitudinal follow-up, and absence of agreed-upon clinical criteria for CTE. A recently launched prospective cohort study of professional fighters, the Professional Fighters Brain Health Study, attempts to overcome some of the problems in studying fighters. Here, we review the cross-sectional results from the first year of the project.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Alzheimer's Research & Therapy

• Publication date

  2013-06-04

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1186/alzrt177PMID 23731821PMCID 3706825
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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