Researchers have published a study which, they say, confirms the presence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in a living person for the first time.
CTE — a degenerative brain disease that is thought to be caused by repeated brain trauma including concussions and sub-concussive hits — can currently only be diagnosed through direct examination of the patient’s brain tissue after death. However, scientists have been using PET scans to identify CTE-like patterns in living people for nearly five years, and this case — which was published in the journal Neurosurgery on Nov. 10 — is the first time that one of those scans has been verified postmortem.