DHAKA: The disease that carves an insidious path through the brain seems to be doing the same through sports.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease associated with concussions, has been identified in both a soccer and a rugby player, according to a review in the journal Acta Neuropathologica, CNN reported.

The brain tissue of people found to have CTE displays an abnormal build-up of tau -- a protein that, when it spills out of cells, can choke off, or disable, neural pathways controlling things like memory, judgment and fear. CTE can be diagnosed only after death.

According to Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist who has examined dozens of brains found to have CTE, the brain of the soccer player -- Patrick Grange -- displayed diffuse disease.
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"There was very severe degeneration of the frontal lobes with widespread tau pathology in the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes," McKee, director of neuropathology at the Bedford VA Medical Center, said in an e-mail. "He is one of the youngest players to have shown this much disease."

BDST: 0918  HRS, MAR 01, 2014