Research Update

Speed, agility and strength are definitely assets on the football field. But when it comes to hits to the head, those talents may actually increase exposure for the young athletes who account for about 70% of this country’s football players.

A study of youth league football players by researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine found that higher vertical jumping ability and faster times in speed and agility drills were generally associated with higher head impact exposure, especially in games as compared to practices.

“Previous studies have shown the severity and number of head impacts increases with the level of play in football, but we have found that there is significant variability in head impact exposure among individuals playing at the same level,” said Jillian E. Urban, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and the study’s senior author.

“Differences in position account for some of that variation at the high school and college levels, but less so in youth football. Our objective was to see if there is a relationship in youth football between head impact exposure and physical ability as measured by commonly used drills, and our results suggest there is.”

The study was published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

Could following a certain type of diet affect the gut microbiome—the good and bad bacteria that live in the gastrointestinal tract—in ways that decrease the risk of Alzheimer’s disease? According to researchers at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, that is a fair possibility.

In a small pilot study, the researchers identified several distinct gut microbiome signatures—the chemicals produced by bacteria—in study participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) but not in their counterparts with normal cognition, and found that these bacterial signatures correlated with higher levels of markers of Alzheimer’s disease in the cerebrospinal fluid of the participants with MCI.

Through cross-group dietary intervention, the study also showed that a modified Mediterranean-ketogenic diet produced changes in the gut microbiome and its metabolites that correlated with reduced levels of Alzheimer’s markers in the members of both study groups.

“The relationship of the gut microbiome and diet to neurodegenerative diseases has recently received considerable attention, and this study suggests that Alzheimer’s disease is associated with specific changes in gut bacteria and that a type of ketogenic Mediterranean diet can affect the microbiome in ways that could impact the development of dementia,” said Hariom Yadav, PhD, assistant professor of molecular medicine who co-authored the study with Suzanne Craft, PhD, professor gerontology and geriatric medicine and director of Wake Forest Baptist Health’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

The study appeared in EBioMedicine, a journal published by The Lancet.

Intensively controlling a person’s blood pressure was more effective at slowing the accumulation of white matter lesions in the brain than standard treatment of high blood pressure. That is according to a nationwide study of hundreds of participants in the National Institutes of Health’s Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT).

Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of trial participants. The results, published in August in the Journal of the American Medical Association, complement a previous study led by a team of scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Health that showed that intensive control of blood pressure significantly reduced the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment.

Jeff Williamson, MD, professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine, was the principal investigator of the previous study. He and colleagues at Wake Forest Baptist were also involved in the most recent study.

“Blood pressure lowering remains the only proven pathway to reducing risk for memory loss,” he said, “and Wake Forest Baptist is honored to have been asked by the National Institutes of Health to lead this research that is helping improve the health of people right here in the Triad as well as across the country.”

Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) have developed a “point-of-care” processing method to create uniformly sized muscle fiber fragments that could be implanted into tissue to restore function to treat muscle loss due to traumatic injury or congenital defects.

“The processing method we developed will help the fragments more readily integrate with the host vascular and neural networks to restore function to patients,” said senior study author Anthony Atala, MD, the W.H. Boyce Professor, director of WFIRM and chair of urology.

For the recently published study, the research team created several pre-clinical injury models to mimic muscle atrophy, muscle defect and stress urinary incontinence. Results for all three model types were promising.

“Our study shows that this method may be most suitable for treating small and critical muscle defects, such as craniofacial muscle defects or the sphincter muscles related to incontinence where small amounts of donor tissue could achieve functional recovery,” said co-author James Yoo, MD, PhD, professor of regenerative medicine at WFIRM.

The study was published in the Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine.