WASHINGTON — Scientists have discovered that measuring a toxic protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease could one day be useful in diagnosing another brain disease. among footballers and others who received repeated blows to the head.
Doctors evaluate symptoms such as mood swings and memory loss to try to determine if patients can have CTEor chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disease linked to concussions and other head trauma. But other diseases cause similar symptoms, and a diagnosis of CTE can only be confirmed by examining the brain after death.
The new clue involves a protein called tau that normally supports neurons but becomes abnormal in Alzheimer’s disease, becoming tangled inside these nerve cells. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis were using autopsy samples to study a tau fragment called eMTBR-tau243 that could help track these tangles when they discovered something unusual: a patient with high levels of this biomarker, even though records showed the person did not have Alzheimer’s disease but advanced CTE.
The researchers turned to a larger collection of autopsied brains and other samples, and ultimately tested stored blood from 11 people classified as having CTE.
Compared to healthy people, eMTBR-tau243 levels were higher in people with advanced CTE, said Chihiro Sato, study co-author and assistant professor of neurology at WashU. This biomarker could not reliably identify CTE at an early stage.
This is an interesting but very preliminary finding, requiring much larger studies to see if there is a real link, cautioned Dr. Rudolph Castellani, a neuropathologist at Northwestern University who was not involved in the research.
Abnormal tau is present in several brain diseases, many of which may overlap in older adults, adding to the difficulty in distinguishing its role in a given disease, including CTE. Sato, who studies these tauopathies, also stressed that more research is needed.
The results were published Friday evening by the medical journal JAMA and presented at a scientific meeting in Japan.
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