Skip to contents
In This Issue:
Alexander Lin, PhD, BWH Department of Radiology
What is your research project about?
Football players can suffer many brain injuries throughout a season, including some injuries that they may not even be aware of. While the consequences of traumatic brain injury in contact sports have made media headlines, it is important to note that not everyone who plays sports will have brain damage and dysfunction. There is still a lot that scientists and doctors need to understand about the short- and long-term consequences of brain trauma in athletes.
Our team, in collaboration with Boston University School of Medicine’s CTE Center, is working on a project to develop a virtual biopsy test that tracks chemicals in the brain to better understand how to identify and treat brain injury. It is called a ‘virtual biopsy’ because we can measure certain chemicals in the brain to assess brain damage without having to perform surgery or give radioactive material to a patient.
What is a unique aspect of your research project?
The unique aspect of this project is that it provides a personalized approach to treating brain injury, since injury can affect people in different ways. Using an MRI machine, we can watch in real time how a person’s brain uses different chemicals. We do this by injecting a safe compound, such as a sugar molecule, and watch as it enters the brain and is converted into other chemicals, such as glutamate. These chemicals are involved in specific processes in the brain, such as inflammation. How these chemicals are processed can provide us with valuable information on the severity of inflammation that may be occurring in the brain. With this information, we can then target these problematic chemical changes with different treatments.
How will your research project benefit people?
Each year, more than 3.8 million people suffer from brain injuries. They include athletes, such as professional football players, but also soldiers injured in war and children injured while playing sports. Brain injuries can also occur as a result of falls or car accidents. Often, damage to the brain as a result of multiple mild head impacts can lead to a brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) with associated memory loss, confusion, aggression, depression, dementia, and, sadly, sometimes suicide.
The test we are developing will help us to find out how to treat problems that arise from brain injuries—problems that may otherwise go undetected until it is too late. By detecting these problems early on, we may be able to stop the damage in the brain before it worsens and severely disrupts a person’s quality of life and independence. If we are successful, this method can also be applied to treating other diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and other neurological disorders.