Brain changes in people with Alzheimer’s disease and in those with mild traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) have significant similarities, a new USC study shows, suggesting new ways to identify patients at high risk for Alzheimer’s. The findings appear this week in GeroScience.
TBIs, which affect over 1.7 million Americans every year, are often followed by changes in brain structure and function and by cognitive problems such as memory deficits, impaired social function and difficulty with decision-making. Although mild TBI — also known as concussion — is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, prior studies haven’t quantified the extent to which these conditions share patterns of neural degeneration in the brain.
USC researchers hypothesized that comparing these patterns could reveal not only how the degenerative trajectories of the two conditions are similar but also which…
