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Hey listeners, it's Eunzi Smith-Rogers.

Today, CTE, a brain disease linked to repeated head impacts, often associated with professional

athletes and military service members. Boston University researcher Jesse Mez joined Stephanie

Desmond to discuss the public health questions around CTE, such as better diagnosis and what

can be done to prevent it, starting with young athletes

and thinking more broadly about safety and professional sports. Let's listen.

Jesse Mez, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me.

I wanted to start simple. How do you explain CTE to someone outside medicine?

CTE is a neurodegenerative disease, not unlike Alzheimer's disease. The same type of

protein, tau protein, accumulates in Alzheimer's disease as it does in CTE. But the pathology has a

different pattern. So we see it at the folds, the depth of the folds of the brain, and we see it around

blood vessels. And it looks very different in terms of the distribution compared to Alzheimer's disease.

Is it a disease that everyone should be worried about, or is it just certain people?

We've seen it almost exclusively in individuals who have had repetitive head impacts.

So these aren't folks who have had one or two or three concussions. These are individuals who have had repetitive head impacts. So these aren't folks who have had one or two or three

concussions. These are individuals who have had thousands of impacts over their contact sport career

or their military service. So it's this accumulation of hits over time that we think is really

related to this disease. And that's sort of a new discovery, isn't it?

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