Ruvo Center seeks participants
Bernick said he will likely enroll about 50 professional bull riders in the next year or two for his study on athletes’ brain health. Currently, 720 fighers and 100 healthy, control participants take part in the study.
Visit healthybrains.org for more information. develop, how long they take to spread, and whether a person can be susceptible to disease through genetic or environmental factors are all unanswered questions. Bernick hopes the study will help answer at least some of them.
“The hope is we’ll participate in helping develop a diagnostic test for CTE,” he said.
The tumble of 2001
Before Semas first rode a bull, he tested his hand at the sport on calves on the ranch where he grew up. He began riding bulls as a teen, and it became a lifelong passion. The fear of risking his life fueled an adrenaline rush every time he straddled a bull.
“It’s extremely dangerous. Every time you climb on one and nod your head, there’s the potential that something horrible can happen,” said Semas, who had his worst and final fall in the summer of 2001, about a year before his retirement. He remembers falling into his riding hand, the mammal tumbling with him.
The memory stops there. Semas was referred to the Cleveland Clinic study through Dr. Tandy Freeman, who works with the Professional Bull Riders Inc., the bull riding organization based in Pueblo, Colorado.
“I just figured it would be a good idea just to get a leg up on anything that could be going on,” Freeman said, adding that he hopes to help advance safety in athletics and PBR as a study participant.
PBR CEO Sean Gleason said he was eager to partner with the Lou Ruvo Center in recognition of the impact brain injury can have on pro riders.
“The health and wellbeing of our athletes is of the utmost importance to us,” he said. “To have someone like the Cleveland Clinic offer to embrace bull riders as part of their study is a huge help to us.”
Since Semas’ retirement, helmets have become mandatory for riders born after Oct. 15, 1994. Still, he’s glad his teenage son and daughter aren’t riders themselves.
“Just watching now, I flinch,” he said. “I know what can happen.”
Contact Jessie Bekker at jbekker@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4563. Follow @jessiebekks on Twitter. symptoms, particularly problems with attention and loss of interest in previously pleasurable activities, Yale neuroscientist Irina Esterlis said Thursday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She wasn’t studying just seniors but a range of ages including people too young for any cognitive changes to be obvious outside of a brain scan — on the theory that early damage can build up.
“We think depression might be accelerating the normal aging,” she said.
A larger study
Her studies so far are small. To prove whether depression really worsens that decline would require tracking synaptic density in larger numbers of people as they get older, to see if and
how it fluctuates over time in those with and without depression, cautioned Jovier Evans, a staff scientist at the National Institute on Mental Health.
Esterlis is planning a larger study to do that. It’s delicate research. Volunteers are injected with a radioactive substance that binds to a protein in the vesicles, or storage bins, used by synapses. Then during a PET scan, areas with synapses light up, allowing researchers to see how many are in different regions of the brain.
Esterlis said there are no medications that specifically target the underlying synapse damage.
But other brain experts said the preliminary findings are a reminder of how important it is to treat depression promptly, so people don’t spend years suffering.
“If your mood isn’t enough to make you go and get treated, then hopefully your cognition is,” said Dr. Mary
Sano, who directs the Mount Sinai Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in New York and wasn’t involved in the new research.
Still, she cautioned that normal cognitive aging is a complicated process that involves other health problems, such as heart disease, that slows blood flow in the brain. It might be that depression, rather than worsening synaptic decline, just makes it more obvious, Sano noted.
With depression “at any age, there’s a hit on the brain. At an older age the hit may be more visible because there may already be some loss,” she explained.