Cause of and Potential Treatment for Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) occurs in about 2.5 million people annually in the U.S. and is a leading cause of death and disability in children and young adults. Both moderate-to-severe TBI (a common event in war scenarios) and repeated mild TBI (increasingly recognized in athletes) can lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). One pathologic feature of CTE is neurofibrillary tangles of tau protein (also seen in Alzheimer disease and some other dementias). But no such tangles are apparent in early TBI.

A multi-institutional team used mouse models of impact and blast injury to elucidate the role of tau protein in TBI and CTE. They found that TBI promptly causes generation of a pathologic form of tau (cis P-tau) that damages cellular inf…