How Concussions Increase Potential Risk to Develop Alzheimer’s Disease
February 2nd, 2025
Everyone knows about the immediate effects of brain injuries like concussions - the headaches, sensitivity to bright lights, memory loss, fatigue, loss of balance; but you might not know about are the lasting effects of a concussion. Concussions stretch and break the neurons in your brain, destabilizing neurons and disrupting communication between brain cells leading to impairing overall brain function.
Your brain has many functions, one of which is the production of ATP, the energy your cells need to function and heal. After a concussion, damaged brain cells produce ATP at a slower rate, creating an energy deficit. This lack of energy availability, compounded by the increased need for ATP to heal injured neurons, is why fatigue is a common symptom of a concussion. This lack of energy delays the brain’s ability to repair itself, as ATP is essential for cell repair and regeneration.
There are two different ways that concussions can impact a brain long term:
The first is the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Over time as your body works to repair the damage caused by a concussion, the healing process can leave behind scarring or chronic inflammation in the brain. This can block the cell's communication and contribute to the formation of tangles in the brain’s tau proteins. The formation of tangles in the brain further blocking cell communication is called Alzheimer’s disease.
The second is white matter damage. White matter is the “communication highway” of the brain, a large network of axons in your brain that allow for the communication between different areas of your brain. To explore the long-term effects of brain injuries, the NIA IRP tracked brain scan data over time from 51 adult participants who had a concussion about 20 years earlier and compared results to 150 participants with no concussion. The data showed that concussed participants had more noticeable levels of white matter damage in their frontal lobes, temporal lobes, and hippocampus. Which are all important areas of the brain contributing to decision making, focus, and organization.
Overall, the experiment conducted by the IRP as well as the consequences of concussions shows how its lingering effects can still impact and impair our brains more than 20 years later.
Sources: What Happens to Your Brain When You Get a Concussion? Brain Injuries from Concussions Still Evident Decades Later (2020) and Image Source
