Alexander Peter Lin1, Saadallah Ramadan1,
Robert A. Stern2,3, Hayden Nicholas Box1, Peter
Stanwell1, Ann C. McKee2,3, Robert Cantu2,
Christopher Nowinski2, Carolyn Elizabeth Mountford1
1Center for Clinical
Spectroscopy, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; 2Center
for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, Boston University School of
Medicine, Boston, MA, United States; 3BU Alzheimer's Disease
Center, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, United States
Recent studies have shown one of the long term effects of repetitive head injury in professional athletes is the neurodegenerative disease of chronic traumatic encephalopathy characterized, post mortem, by abnormal tau accumulation in the brain. In this preliminary study, we use localized correlated spectroscopy (L-COSY) to identify multiple neurochemical species that demonstrate significant changes from cumulative head trauma. These changes include markers of diffuse axonal injury, glutamatergic dysfunction, alterations in excitatory, inhibitory, and structural amino acids and that would have been difficult to measure using conventional 1D MRS.