A school of hard knocks

Researchers seeking to map out individual vulnerability to brain injuries

KNOCKS to the head cause lasting damage such as Parkinson’s disease in some people and scientists want to understand why.

University of Adelaide Associate Professor Lyndsey Collins-Praino believes the answer is within reach.

She has almost $2m from the federal government’s medical research future fund to develop a new forecasting tool to predict a patient’s longterm prognosis.

“Right now, if you have a head injury, because we don’t know what your ultimate outcome might be, it can feel really scary,” Dr Collins-Praino said. “That’s why research like this is so important, because it helps us to identify risk and take that critical first step to being able to do something about it.”

The new three-year study will soon recruit patients with traumatic brain injury, through neurologists.

These volunteers will then be studied using a combination of imaging techniques to look at the brain, cognitive and motor assessments to see how the brain and body is functioning, and blood tests to check for various biomarkers of brain inflammation.

“This is significant, as we can then compare this to the same markers in both healthy individuals and those who have an established diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease,” Dr Collins-Praino said. “This will allow us to generate a unique brain injury neural signature. Then, using machine learning, we can generate a risk prediction algorithm.”

If all goes to plan, Dr Collins-Praino said, neurologists would be able to intervene earlier and offer much more targeted clinical management of people deemed most at risk of degenerative disease.

“It gets towards personalised medicine, where we know if person A has a head injury and they meet these criteria that say they are at increased risk for Parkinson’s, then there are things we can do,” she said.

When former AFL and SANFL star Mark Mickan, 59, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2016, his doctor asked if he was born in the country (raising the risk of exposure to chemical sprays), played competitive sport or had a family history of the disease. He said yes to all three.

Like the world champion boxer Muhammad Ali, possibly the most famous person to have had Parkinson’s disease to date, he’s taken more than a few hard knocks.

“It gave me the best years of my life, footy, and you sign up knowing there’s a possibility you’ll get hit in the head,” he said. “The clubs just went with what they knew at the time and treated you accordingly.”