Why one man is riding every SEPTA Regional Rail line in just two days

Scientists stumbled onto a hint that measuring a toxic protein tied to Alzheimer’s disease just might one day be useful in diagnosing a different brain disease in football players and others who have suffered repeated blows to the head.

The Details

Doctors evaluate symptoms such as mood swings and memory loss to try to tell if patients may have CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disease linked to concussions and other brain trauma. But other diseases cause similar symptoms, and a CTE diagnosis 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, tangling inside those nerve cells. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis were using autopsy samples to study a tau fragment called eMTBR-tau243 that may help track those tangles when they found something unusual: a patient with high levels of that biomarker even though records showed the person didn’t have Alzheimer