In vivo L-COSY identifies neurochemical changes in professional athletes with repetitive head injuries

Recent studies have shown one of the long term effects of repetitive head injury in professional athletes is the neurodegenerative disease of chronic traumatic encephalopathy characterized, post mortem, by abnormal tau accumulation in the brain. In this preliminary study, we use localized correlated spectroscopy (L-COSY) to identify multiple neurochemical species that demonstrate significant changes from cumulative head trauma. These changes include markers of diffuse axonal injury, glutamatergic dysfunction, alterations in excitatory, inhibitory, and structural amino acids and that would have been difficult to measure using conventional 1D MRS