Grant: DRA : Canada Graduate Research Scholarship - Doctoral Program (CGRS D)

Athletes in contact sports like ice hockey and rugby regularly experience hits to the head during normal play. While most do not result in concussions, there are worries that these repeated head impacts might result in long-term brain health changes, particularly when athletes are exposed to contact sports at a young age. Contact sports have also been associated with neurodegenerative diseases, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Currently, athletes can only be diagnosed with CTE post-mortem, with no viable in-vivo biomarkers available to assess the risk of CTE development, which creates a significant gap in our understanding of what occurs in the brain before death. This research uses advanced brain imaging to detect early signs of brain changes in young university athletes irrespective of presenting symptoms. We followed three teams over multiple seasons: men's and women's ice hockey, and women's rugby, comparing them to non-contact sport athletes. We collected pre- and post-season neuroimaging timepoints to assess baseline differences and longitudinal alterations in brain health. Additionally, we used instrumented mouthguards, which are able to record the acceleration and direction of an individual impact sustained, to quantify head impact exposure metrics that are unique to each athlete. The analysis will focus on three specific aspects of brain health: grey matter structure, white matter microstructure damage, and cerebral blood flow. This approach will accurately assess structural and blood flow alterations over time, which are brain health changes that have previously been linked to CTE development. Additionally, I will correlate head impact exposure metrics with these results to determine if brain health changes are dependent on the amount of head contact sustained. By identifying brain health changes early, we hope to better understand the risk of contact sports and potentially develop ways to protect athletes' long-term brain health.