Your delicate brain, protected by the cage of the skull, is more resistant than it seems, but it has its limits. After a mild blow to the head, he recovers quickly, but if you don’t give him time between trauma and trauma, he ends up sustaining permanent damage. This is suggested by a new study carried out with mice, but which will help to understand how continuous impacts such as those suffered by soccer players and other contact sports affect our gray mass.
Mark Burns and his colleagues at Georgetown University Medical Center (Washington, DC) subjected several mice to a single light blow to the head, which stunned them but caused no damage. The impact type is designed to simulate a minor concussion or traumatic brain injury to a person.
One day after the blow, 13% of the dendrites (terminals of the neurons that connect them together) of the rodents had disappeared in specific regions of the brain ; three days after the injury, these connections reappeared, even in greater numbers than before, helping the brain to recover.
When scientists subjected other specimens to 30 small bumps over six weeks, those connections did not reappear after fading. But if a week was allowed to elapse between impact and impact, the animals’ brains showed signs of recovery.
One year after the experiment, the white matter (the innermost part) of the brains of successively struck rodents was still inflamed. These tissues transmit the signals between brain regions. The most punished specimens showed signs of anxiety and balance problems.
The authors of the research affirm that their work will contribute to improve the knowledge of what happens in the brains of people subjected to continuous and small brain trauma – American football players, footballers who frequently hit the ball with the head and other athletes -; and they add that it will warn of the risk of neurodegenerative and behavioral problems that may arise from this cause.
