A traumatic brain injury, or TBI, is caused by a contusion to the head that may result in injury to the brain. This type of injury combined with the inherited genetic risk factors can result in the accelerated development of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia, or ADRD. TBIs range from mild to severe, with the majority being mild.
They are especially common in adolescents engaging in contact sports and in the elderly who tend to fall with greater frequency as they age. Regardless of the source, TBI and how it progresses to ADRD is an understudied area of research. A $3.
5 million grant to the University of California, Riverside, and Indiana University, from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health will now examine how TBI at different ages and genetic risk factors leads to ADRD. There's some literature that suggests that traumatic brain injury can evolve in some cases to Alzheimer's or accelerate Alzheimer's-like symptoms." Andre Obenaus, professor of biomedical sciences at UCR's School of Medicine and principal investigator of the three-year grant "We are interested in the complex interplay between TBI and genetic risk factors, and how these increase the susceptibility for individuals to develop Alzheimer's disease and related dementia," said Paul Territo, a professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and co-principal investigator of the proposed work.
Using rodents, Obenaus, Territo, and the.