PAC 12 Brain Research Alliance and Informatics Network
PAC BRAIN
The PAC 12 Brain Research Alliance and Informatics Network (PAC BRAIN) will develop a new consortium of leading neuroimaging scientists, athletic trainers, and medical/physician personal from across the entire PAC12 to share protocols for athletic head injury,conduct pre- and post-season collection of anonymized Presagia Sports electronic medical records. Carry out pre- and post-season multimodal neuroimaging evaluations of Pac12 athletes and rigorously monitor head impacts using sensor technologies Gather neurological and blood biomarker measurements, and exchange, archive, and openly share these anonymized data across our network of investigators, the Pac12, and beyond. Our proposal is directly in line with the goals of the Pac12 RFP to engage multiple Pac12 schools toward further research and development ofprograms to maintain and promote student-athlete health.
What do we do?
Amateur, collegiate, and professional athletes often experience repetitive head impacts and concussive injuries which can affect their return to play, have longer-term effects later in life, and have been linked to severe cognitive impairment and dementia. A major challenge exists to identify objective individual signatures/biomarkers on top of current standardized concussion protocols to protect student athletes and prevent brain injury leading to brain atrophy and connectopathies later in life. In order to protect student athletes from brain concussion and to enable physicians, health professionals, and cognizant athletic trainers, to fully understand the parameters and essential aspects of brain damage caused by a single or repetitive head impact, we would like to determine why some players who are subjected to a typical head impact encountered in contact sports result in permanent neurological damage leading to dementia later in life, while other players, when subjected to the same levels of head impact, do not appear to have any neurologic deficit at all. In order to achieve this, vast amounts of data needs to be collected from many athletes from across a consortium of PAC12 universities. Specific combinations of pre-existing cognitive/memory tests, neuroimaging, types of forces detectable by sensors, genotyping (e.g. APOE4) and other blood biomarkers will inform athletic trainers, physicians and coaches when evaluating individual athletes. The broad goal is to be able to identify those NCAA athletes who are more likely to suffer a neurological trajectory similar to that seen in patients having degenerative neurological disease. We expect the proposed PAC 12 Brain Research Alliance and Informatics Network (PAC BRAIN) project to have significant impact for understanding and preventing concussions in student athletics as well as for other causes of brain trauma.
Through this multi-site informatics effort we will employ a shared multimodal neuroimaging among PAC12 schools for pre- and post-season imaging along with in-play head impact monitoring. We will apply novel neuroimaging analytics to correlate head-impact sensor and neuropsychological metrics with changes in brain morphometry, function, and connectivity. Finally, the consortium will meet regularly on monthly conference calls and annually in-person for a one-day meeting at the annual PAC12 Student Athlete Health Conference meeting held each May.
Data
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Research
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