Chronic traumatic encephalopathy: genes load the gun and repeated concussion pulls the trigger

The association between traumatic brain injury (TBI) and an increased risk of neurodegeneration has been recognized for some decades now (Faden and Loane,2015),with recent evidence suggesting that a history of TBI,either as repeated concussive/mild TBI insults typically experienced by some athletes or less commonly as a single moderate/severe injury,may be linked with an increased risk of developing a specific form of neurodegeneration known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy(CTE) (McKee et al.,2016).