Published in a peer-reviewed journal
The aftermath of boxing revisited
Identifying chronic traumatic encephalopathy pathology in the original Corsellis boxer series
Marc H. Goldfinger, Helen Ling, Bension S. Tilley, Alan K. L. Liu, Karen Davey, Janice L. Holton, Tamas Revesz, Steve M. Gentleman. 2018. Acta Neuropathologica.
Summary
Researchers reassessed tissue from 14 historical boxing cases and identified CTE pathology in seven using the diagnostic criteria applied in the study.
What the work reports
- The authors stained tissue from 14 of the original 15 cases for abnormal tau protein and judged each case against the preliminary consensus criteria for CTE published in 2016.
- Seven of the 14 cases met those criteria. One of the seven also showed Alzheimer’s disease pathology.
- Ten cases showed a separate age-related tau change in support cells of the brain, including all seven CTE cases. Two cases showed no abnormality, and the authors could not confirm a boxing history for those two.
Limits to keep in mind
- Fourteen cases. A series this small cannot say how common CTE is among boxers.
- The tissue had been stored since the early 1970s, and the authors did not have every brain region the criteria recommend.
- CTE was identified by examining brain tissue after death.
Publication status
Published in a peer-reviewed journal. Published as correspondence in Acta Neuropathologica.
No correction or retraction notice was found in Crossref, PubMed or Scite when this record was checked.
Rights
CC BY 4.0. Open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The summary on this page is FMRI’s own wording. No text or figure from the article is reproduced here. Licence terms.
FMRI’s role
None. This is external research by the authors and institutions named. FMRI lists it and summarizes it in its own words.
See the source record for the authors' funding and disclosures.