Dr Helen Murray explores the relationship between repetitive head injuries, contact sport and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) - a progressive brain disease that causes dementia.

Dr Helen Murray explores the relationship between repetitive head injuries and dementia. (A highlight from Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Edition)

Listen to the talk

From the discussion

During my PhD, I studied Alzheimer's disease at the University of Auckland's Centre for Brain Research. I worked with human tissue that was donated to the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank. And so throughout my PhD, I learnt how to preserve brain tissue and to prepare these ultra-thin slices of tissue for my studies, and how to apply very specific fluorescent labels that would bind to only one part of the tissue that I wanted to study. It could be something like a blood vessel, a certain type of brain cell, or one of the pathologies that we wanted to understand.

And throughout that process, I learnt how to study different processes within the brain tissue. I learnt how to take microscope images of the labelling that I was doing. These images enable us to look at what's happening inside the brain at a microscopic level. Throughout the course of my PhD, I was studying Alzheimer's disease and the main kind of character in the project I was looking at is this protein called Tau.

Tau's normal function is to keep brain cells structurally stable, but in Alzheimer's disease the Tau proteins become altered, and they start to clump together. And that causes them to form these dense structures called tangles.

Tangle pathology is not just a feature of Alzheimer's, and CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease associated with traumatic concussion) is one of the diseases where we see this Tau protein start to form. But the difference between these diseases is where the Tau starts to accumulate in the brain, and how it moves round the brain, as the disease progresses.

In Alzheimer's, we see these Tau tangles in the area of the brain that controls memory. That's where they start to form first. But in CTE, we see the Tau tangles forming in the deep valleys between the folds in the brain, and more specifically round blood vessels. This pathology actually makes a lot of sense. When you get any kind of knock to the head, not necessarily a serious concussion, you get the forces that are concentrated around areas where the structure of the tissue is less consistent, around blood vessels and in these folds in the brain…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details