“It Will Make CTE a Treatable Disease”: The Race for a Diagnosis in Life
When you’re not feeling yourself, you hope your doctor can provide some answers. Maybe they can tell you what’s wrong, why it’s happening, and what can be done about it. Or, if they can’t zero in on a diagnosis, perhaps tests—blood work, scans, samples—can help fill in the gaps.
But what if a diagnosis never comes? What if you remain a medical mystery? For those worried that they might have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated hits to the head, a definitive resolution may remain out of reach.
CTE has become synonymous with collision-heavy sports like football and linked to a jumble of symptoms—memory loss, confusion, aggression, poor impulse control, slow movement, and more—but there is currently no way of diagnosing it in life. The only way to confirm if someone had the progressive disease is to examine their brain after death. That’s not much consolation if you suspect you or a loved one is suffering with it today.
In an age when brain scans can help identify Alzheimer’s disease, blood tests can spot cancer, and a clinical interview is all it takes to assess many psychiatric disorders, why does identifying CTE in the living remain so elusive?
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