Multimodal Imaging of Retired Professional Contact Sport Athletes Does Not Provide Evidence of Structural and
Robert Zivadinov1, Paul Polak, Ferdinand Schweser
1Buffalo Neuroimaging Analysis Center, Department of Neurology (Drs Zivadinov, Polak, Schweser, Bergsland, Hagemeier, Dwyer, and Ramasamy), MR Imaging Clinical and Translational Research Center (Drs Zivadinov and Schweser), Department of Orthopaedics (Drs Baker and Leddy), Department of Nuclear Medicine (Dr Baker), and Department of Psychiatry (Dr Willer), Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo.
Background:
Long-term consequences of playing professional football and hockey on brain function and structural neuronal integrity are unknown.
Objectives:
To investigate multimodal metabolic and structural brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) differences in retired professional contact sport athletes compared with noncontact sport athletes.
Methods:
Twenty-one male contact sport athletes and 21 age-matched noncontact sport athletes were scanned on a 3 tesla (3T) MRI using a multimodal imaging approach. The MRI outcomes included presence, number, and volume of focal white matter signal abnormalities, volumes of global and regional tissue-specific brain structures, diffusion-tensor imaging tract-based spatial statistics measures of mean diffusivity and fractional anisotropy, quantitative susceptibility mapping of deep gray matter, presence, number, and volume of cerebral microbleeds, MR spectroscopy N-acetyl-aspartate, glutamate, and glutamine concentrations relative to creatine and phosphor creatine of the corpus callosum, and perfusion-weighted imaging mean transit time, cerebral blood flow, and cerebral blood volume outcomes. Subjects were also classified as having mild cognitive impairment.
Results:
No significant differences were found for structural or functional MRI measures between contact sport athletes and noncontact sport athletes.
Conclusions:
This multimodal imaging study did not show any microstructural, metabolic brain tissue injury differences in retired contact versus non-contact sport athletes.
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