{"id":60748,"date":"2018-08-07T11:01:58","date_gmt":"2018-08-07T15:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/busm\/?p=60748"},"modified":"2018-08-07T11:01:58","modified_gmt":"2018-08-07T15:01:58","slug":"another-accolade-for-cte-researcher-ann-mckee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/2018\/08\/07\/another-accolade-for-cte-researcher-ann-mckee\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Accolade for CTE Researcher Ann McKee"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alzheimer\u2019s Association gives her Lifetime Achievement Award<\/h4>\n
\"\"
Ann McKee\u2019s pioneering research into the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has earned her a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alzheimer\u2019s Association. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From diagnosing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in tight-end-turned-killer Aaron Hernandez<\/a>\u00a0to being named the Boston Globe<\/em>\u2019s Bostonian of the Year<\/a>\u00a0and one of TIME<\/em>\u2019s 100 Most Influential People<\/a>, Ann McKee<\/a>\u00a0has been a media-attention magnet in the last year.<\/p>\n

The director of BU\u2019s CTE Center<\/a>\u00a0has been honored with another accolade, this one from a group of peers. McKee recently received the Henry Wisniewski Lifetime Achievement Award<\/a>\u00a0from the Alzheimer\u2019s Association International Conference, the world\u2019s largest gathering of researchers of that disease and other dementias.<\/p>\n

CTE is associated with dementia, mood changes, and aggression and afflicts many athletes and soldiers. In giving her the award, the Alzheimer\u2019s Association noted, among other achievements, that she created the \u201cMcKee criteria<\/a>\u201d for diagnosing CTE and established its four progressive stages<\/a>.<\/p>\n

McKee, professor of neurology and pathology at the School of Medicine, and the associate director of BU\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s Disease Center<\/a>, was one of three researchers honored by the Alzheimer\u2019s Association. The other honorees \u00a0were Jeffrey L. Cummings from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, and John Q. Trojanowski from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.<\/p>\n

Maria C. Carrillo, the Alzheimer\u2019s Association\u2019s chief science officer, lauded the three for their \u201clasting contributions to help accelerate the progress towards finding the underlying causes, treatments, and preventions for Alzheimer\u2019s and related dementias.\u201d<\/p>\n

Calling herself \u201cdeeply honored\u201d by the award, McKee notes that it was named for a noted neuropathologist who \u201cwas an early inspiration to my career in Alzheimer\u2019s disease research and, later, in my fascination\u201d with CTE.<\/p>\n

She also credited colleagues at the CTE Center, as well as BU\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s Disease Center, the Framingham Heart Study<\/a>, and the VA Boston Healthcare System, with contributing to her research.<\/p>\n

That research in the last few years has included uncovering important facts about CTE at seemingly breakneck speed. This year, McKee and her team published a study<\/a>\u00a0reporting that CTE, once thought to be caused by concussions, actually might be the result of repeated hits to the head.<\/p>\n

If confirmed, the finding would upend current efforts to cushion athletes against concussions, raising instead the daunting question of how to reduce head hits. That would require that sports face \u201cthe fundamental danger these activities pose to human health,\u201d McKee said at the time the study was published.<\/p>\n

Last December, the Globe<\/em> wrote that \u201cfootball may never be the same\u201d as a result of her research, noting the irony that McKee grew up in Wisconsin as \u201ca devoted Green Bay Packers fan.\u201d<\/p>\n

This BU Today<\/em> story was written by Rich Barlow<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alzheimer\u2019s Association gives her Lifetime Achievement Award.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[89,91],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60748"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60752,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60748\/revisions\/60752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}