Paula and
I recently attended a dinner party where everyone either had a spouse with
Alzheimer’s or had been diagnosed with the disease itself. All of the diagnosed
individuals happened to be men, and all but one of us reported suffering a
concussion as a child. Mine came when I was around six, riding on the back
fender of my brother’s bike. When I came to, I was lying in the back seat of
our car, not long before we reached our doctor’s office, a trip of about
fifteen minutes. It is clear that I had fallen backwards. My brother, who was
four years older, recalls seeing an egg-shaped lump protruding from the back of
my head. He raced down our hill to alert our mom. This was long before kids wore bike
helmets.
Could that single childhood concussion have predisposed me
to develop Alzheimer’s in middle age? From an early age I liked to play rough
games—wrestling with my brother on our carpet, not far from our brick mantel, or
playing tackle football in our backyard, without helmets, often with bigger
boys. The playgrounds at our elementary school were entirely paved, which ruled
out playing tackle football—unless snow was on the ground. In one of the years
when we did get substantial snow, I banged heads with a friend of mine. I
didn’t exactly feel the pain but I smelled it—an odor of rubbing alcohol, or
something else one might encounter in a hospital. In sixth grade, I played my
first of seven seasons of organized football.
An article published in 2011, “Long Term Consequences:
Effects on Normal Development Profile after Concussion,” notes that “immature
neural tissue differs from mature tissue in reponse to injury.” The key word is
“plasticity.” A young brain, in other words, is more vulnerable to damage than
an adult brain is. In one sense, I feel fortunate. Whatever damage I suffered
from that long-ago head injury, it had little effect on me as I was growing up.
I generally did well in school, though in math I got no further than geometry,
a subject that I struggled with. It’s possible that my childhood bicycle accident
did enough harm to damage my spatial reasoning. My sense of direction has never
been good, and these days it is atrocious.
But according to the study I cited, many childhood head
injuries come with much more damaging consequences. “Because the prefrontal
cortex is one of the last brain structures to mature, it is not surprising that
parents [often] report attention deficits, hyperactivity or conduct disorder,”
following a concussion, according to the study. That my head hit on the back of
the skull, rather than a more sensitive part of the brain, may have spared me
from worse damage. My consequences, to the extent that I can document them,
were a good deal more subtle. I was a high-spirited child, but I did well in
school. Yet I do believe that my concussion roughly 50 years ago is at least
partly responsible for my short-term memory and executive-function difficulties
today. Throw in the countless helmet hits I endured in my seven years of organized
football, and there should be little mystery about why I began to experience
mild symptoms of Alzheimer’s a few months before my 51st birthday.
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