Can Parkinsonian Symptoms Be Brought On by Traumatic Brain Injury?

TBI linked to Parkinson’s and Parkinson-related brain defects

Researchers at the Group Health Research Institute relates research to Muhammad Ali—and how we can prevent late-life injuries and falls for our families and ourselves.-JR

by Eric B. Larson, MD, MPH, executive director of Group Health Research Institute and vice president for research at Group Health

Traumatic brain injury (TBI), including concussion, is a big problem in older adulthood, the stage of life when accidents—especially falls—happen most often. Yet we hear a lot about TBI from sports, particularly football head injuries in younger people.

Muhammad Ali, who recently died, had a symptom complex called Parkinsonism. It’s very likely that multiple blows to the head from boxing set the stage for this condition. A new study that I helped to lead confirms concern over effects of TBI that threaten the structure and function of brain cells.

Here’s what we found—and didn’t find

With colleagues from the University of Washington (UW), Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic, Rush University Medical Center, and the University of Utah, Paul Crane, MD, MPH, and I recently published “Association between Traumatic Brain Injury and Late Life Neurodegenerative Conditions and Neuropathological Findings" in JAMA Neurology. Dr. Crane is a professor of general internal medicine at the UW School of Medicine, an adjunct professor of health services at the UW School of Public Health, and an affiliate investigator at Group Health Research Institute (GHRI).

How to prevent falls

On a practical level, though, this research should remind us of just how important it is to prevent falls and other accidents. Here’s how you can prevent falls:

• Get regular exercise for general conditioning, strength, and balance training. 
• Avoid drugs that impair balance and judgment, such as narcotics, anticholinergics, and tranquilizers, and avoid over-treating high blood pressure and diabetes.
• Eliminate hazards in your environment—like inadequate lighting, rugs and cords that can cause tripping.
• Wear shoes or slippers with good soles that are not too thick. The ACT study has shown that older people are much more likely to fall in the home if they walk barefoot or in stocking feet.  
• At some point, consider using a cane or walker to avoid falls.

FULL ARTICLE HERE:

What determines recovery time for a child after a traumatic brain injury?

This article explains why it takes children different amounts of time to recover from traumatic brain injury.

Why do some youngsters bounce back quickly from a traumatic brain injury, while others suffer devastating side effects for years?

New UCLA/USC research suggests that damage to the fatty sheaths around the brain's nerve fibers--not injury severity-- may explain the difference. Published in the July 15 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience, the finding identifies possible biomarkers that physicians could use to predict higher-risk patients who require closer monitoring.

The study is the first to combine imaging scans with recording of the brain's electrical activity to reveal how damage to the protective coating around the brain's circuitry affects how quickly children and teens can process and recall information after a concussion or other head trauma.

"Just as electricians insulate electrical wires to shield their connections, the brain's nerve fibers are encased in a fatty tissue called myelin that protects signals as they travel across the brain," explained Dr. Christopher Giza, director of the UCLA Steve Tisch BrainSPORT Program and a professor of pediatrics and neurosurgery at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine and Mattel Children's Hospital. "We suspected that trauma was damaging the myelin and slowing the brain's ability to transmit information, interfering with patients' capacity to learn."

To test their hypothesis, the scientists assigned a series of mental tasks to 32 youngsters ages 8 to 19. Each had suffered a moderate to severe brain injury in the past five months. The tests evaluated the children's processing speed, short-term memory, verbal learning and cognitive flexibility.

The UCLA team recorded the kids' brains' electrical activity to test how quickly their nerve fibers could transmit information, and then imaged the wiring to assess its structural soundness.

When the scientists compared the patients' results to those of a matched control group of 31 healthy children, they discovered dramatic differences.

Half of the brain-injury group showed widespread damage to the myelin insulating their brain's circuitry. These patients performed 14 percent more poorly on the cognitive tests and their wiring worked three times slower than healthy children's.

Scans of the other 16 patients in the brain-injury group showed their myelin was nearly intact; and their brains were able to process information as quickly as healthy children's. They performed 9 percent better on the cognitive tasks than the youngsters with more myelin damage, though not as well as the uninjured kids.

"Our research suggests that imaging the brain's wiring to evaluate both its structure and function could help predict a patient's prognosis after a traumatic brain injury," said first author Emily Dennis, a postdoctoral researcher at USC's Keck School of Medicine.

"Our next step will be to explore how brain biomarkers change during a patient's first year of recovery when most people recapture some cognitive function," said principal investigator Robert Asarnow, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and College of Letters and Science.

Traumatic brain injury is the single most common cause of death and disability in children and teens, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The research was supported by funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the National Cancer Institute.

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Long-term outcomes of TBI treatment

A study looked into different TBI treatments and their long-term neurological outcomes.

In patients with a traumatic brain injury (TBI), neither the administration of the hormone erythropoietin (EPO) or maintaining a higher hemoglobin concentration through blood transfusion resulted in improved neurological outcome at 6 months, according to a study in the July 2 issue of JAMA. Transfusing at higher hemoglobin concentrations was associated with a higher risk of adverse events

Patients with severe traumatic brain injury commonly develop anemia. For patients with neurological injury, anemia is a potential cause of secondary injury, which may worsen neurological outcomes. Treatment of anemia may include transfusions of packed red blood cells or administration of erythropoietin. There is limited information about the effect of erythropoietin or a high hemoglobin transfusion threshold (if the hemoglobin concentration drops below a certain level, a transfusion is performed) after a TBI, according to background information in the article.

Claudia S. Robertson, M.D., of the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, and colleagues conducted a randomized clinical trial that included 200 patients (erythropoietin, n = 102; placebo, n = 98) with a closed head injury at neurosurgical intensive care units in two U.S. level I trauma centers between May 2006 and August 2012. Patients were enrolled within 6 hours of injury and had to be unable to follow commands after initial stabilization. Erythropoietin or placebo was initially dosed daily for 3 days and then weekly for 2 more weeks (n = 74). There were 99 patients assigned to a hemoglobin transfusion threshold of 7 g/dL and 101 patients assigned to 10 g/dL.

In the placebo group, 34 patients (38.2 percent) recovered to a favorable outcome (defined as good recovery and moderate disability, as measured by a functional assessment inventory) compared with 17 patients (48.6 percent) in the erythropoietin 1 group (first dosing regimen) and 17 patients (29.8 percent) in the erythropoietin 2 group (second dosing regimen). Thirty-seven patients (42.5 percent) assigned to the transfusion threshold of 7 g/dL recovered to a favorable outcome compared with 31 patients (33.0 percent) assigned to the transfusion threshold of 10 g/dL.

There was a higher incidence of thromboembolic events for the transfusion threshold of 10 g/dL (21.8 percent) vs (8.1 percent) for the threshold of 7 g/dL.

"Among patients with closed head injury, neither the administration of erythropoietin nor maintaining hemoglobin concentration of at least 10 g/dL resulted in improved neurological outcome at 6 months. These findings do not support either approach in patients with traumatic brain injury," the authors conclude.

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Better-educated people have easier recoveries from TBI

A study shows that those who are more highly educated have better recoveries from traumatic brain injury.

Better-educated people appear to be significantly more likely to recover from a moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), suggesting that a brain's "cognitive reserve" may play a role in helping people get back to their previous lives, new Johns Hopkins research shows.

The researchers, reporting in the journal Neurology, found that those with the equivalent of at least a college education are seven times more likely than those who didn't finish high school to be disability-free one year after a TBI serious enough to warrant inpatient time in a hospital and rehabilitation facility.

The findings, while new among TBI investigators, mirror those in Alzheimer's disease research, in which higher educational attainment -- believed to be an indicator of a more active, or more effective, use of the brain's "muscles" and therefore its cognitive reserve -- has been linked to slower progression of dementia.

"After this type of brain injury, some patients experience lifelong disability, while others with very similar damage achieve a full recovery," says study leader Eric B. Schneider, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Center for Surgical Trials and Outcomes Research. "Our work suggests that cognitive reserve ¬ -- the brain's ability to be resilient in the face of insult or injury -- could account for the difference."

Schneider conducted the research in conjunction with Robert D. Stevens. M.D., a neuro-intensive care physician with Johns Hopkins' Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine.

For the study, the researchers studied 769 patients enrolled in the TBI Model Systems database, an ongoing multi-center cohort of patients funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The patients had been hospitalized with a moderate to severe TBI and subsequently admitted to a rehabilitation facility.

Of the 769 patients, 219 -- or 27.8 percent -- were free of any detectable disability one year after their injury. Twenty-three patients who didn't complete high school -- 9.7 percent of those at that education level -- recovered, while 136 patients with between 12 and 15 years of schooling -- 30.8 percent of those at that educational level -- did. Nearly 40 percent of patients -- 76 of the 194 -- who had 16 or more years of education fully recovered.

Schneider says researchers don't currently understand the biological mechanisms that might account for the link between years of schooling and improved recovery.

"People with increased cognitive reserve capabilities may actually heal in a different way that allows them to return to their pre-injury function and/or they may be able to better adapt and form new pathways in their brains to compensate for the injury," Schneider says. "Further studies are needed to not only find out, but also to use that knowledge to help people with less cognitive reserve."

Meanwhile, he says, "What we learned may point to the potential value of continuing to educate yourself and engage in cognitively intensive activities. Just as we try to keep our bodies strong in order to help us recover when we are ill, we need to keep the brain in the best shape it can be."

Adds Stevens: "Understanding the underpinnings of cognitive reserve in terms of brain biology could generate ideas on how to enhance recovery from brain injury."

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