The first time I saw CTE was actually in a
boxer. He came into our Alzheimer’s center. He was diagnosed by our very good clinicians
as having Alzheimer’s disease. And I know from speaking to the clinicians
that the reason they didn’t think that boxing was accounting for his symptoms was that he
had retired from boxing at the age of 32, and here he was in his seventies. He became symptomatic in his fifties, but
much worse in his sixties and died at 73. They couldn’t understand why there had been
that lag period of some 30 years before we really exhibited prominent symptoms. So the diagnosis during life was Alzheimer’s
disease and then when I saw the brain, when I looked at it under the microscope, it had
just this florid pattern of tau and it was just, to a person who’s fascinated by this,
who studied tau for many years, was really very involved the intricacies for different
diseases as their signature. I was blown away. I’d never seen a pattern like that, and
it circled around blood vessels. It was very patchy. It was very dense in parts of the brain that
are usually not affected. So it was fascinating. I immediately started really trying to understand Paul Pender’s brain.
“I was blown away.”
Dr. Ann McKee recounts the first time she saw signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a boxer thought to have had Alzheimer’s disease.
Posted on BrainLine January 11, 2019.
About the author: Ann McKee, MD
Ann McKee, MD is the chief neuropathologist for the Framingham Heart Study and the Boston University-based Centenarian Study. She is also the chief neuropathologist for the Boston-based Veterans Administration Medical Centers and for the Sports Legacy Institute.
