Published in a peer-reviewed journalOriginal research

Repeated head trauma is associated with smaller thalamic volumes and slower processing speed

The Professional Fighters' Brain Health Study

Charles Bernick, Sarah J Banks, Wanyong Shin, Nancy Obuchowski, Sam Butler, Michael Noback, Michael Phillips, Mark Lowe, Stephen Jones, Michael Modic. 2015. British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Read the full textDOI 10.1136/bjsports-2014-093877PubMed 25633832

The medical question

How should research measure and protect a fighter’s neurological health over time?

This evidence informs questions about cumulative exposure, neurological assessment and long-term health. The Fight Medicine Research Institute examines the study design, the fighters included and the outcomes measured when developing its own research questions.

Summary

Professional-fighter exposure histories, MRI measurements and cognitive tests were compared. Greater cumulative fight exposure was associated with smaller regional brain volumes and slower processing.

What the abstract reports

  • The analysis used baseline data from 224 professional fighters (131 MMA fighters and 93 boxers) and 22 controls in the Professional Fighters Brain Health Study.
  • More fight exposure, measured by number of professional fights, years of fighting or a fight exposure score, was associated with lower brain volumes, most clearly in the thalamus and caudate.
  • Processing speed was slower with smaller thalamic volume and with greater fight exposure.

Publication status and notices

Published in a peer-reviewed journal. Cross-sectional baseline analysis in British Journal of Sports Medicine. PubMed publication type: Journal Article.

No correction, retraction or expression of concern was found in PubMed, Crossref or Scite when this record was checked.

Fight Medicine Research Institute contribution

Fight Medicine Research Institute selected and catalogued this study, prepared an original research summary, verified its bibliographic details, and maintains the associated citation record.

Article details

Relationship
External research catalogued by the Fight Medicine Research Institute. The original authors, journal and DOI are unchanged.
Published online
29 January 2015
Issue date
August 2015, volume 49, issue 15
Repository date
29 January 2015 (Europe PMC first-publication date)
Date used here
29 January 2015 (Crossref publisher deposit, online publication date)
Rights
CC BY-NC 4.0. Open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), as recorded by Europe PMC and the licence link in the source record. The licence does not cover commercial reuse. The summary on this page is Fight Medicine Research Institute’s own wording. No abstract text, figure or table from the article is reproduced here. Licence terms.
Source check
, against PubMed (NCBI), Crossref, Europe PMC and Scite. Checked under the direction of Casey C. Sears, Founder. An LLM was utilized as a research tool with direct human oversight.
Appraisal
The check covered bibliographic details, links, licence and notices. It is not a formal critical appraisal of the full paper.
Clinical review
None. This record is a research summary, not clinical education.
Funding and conflicts
See the source record for the authors’ funding and disclosures.
Catalog
FH-002, added

Cite the original work

These files cite the work by its own authors, journal and DOI. Fight Medicine Research Institute appears only in a note, as curator of this catalog page.

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