'taint sweet nor cute…
But once brain trauma happens there should be some way of stopping it from becoming a progressive disease.
These symptoms are showing up in football players ten years after their football careers are over.
Tacitus, whaddaya think might be done to stop the progression? Antioxidants? Centrophenoxine? Lithium? EDTA? Alpha glycerophosphocholine? I, myself, am too ignorant of what Tau proteins are about, but (aside from discouraging head bumping to begin with) there must be some means of limiting the continuing brain deterioration over time.
Since the symptoms get worse over forty, is it possible that hormonal changes or some other effect of normal aging are causing an acceleration of “brain rot” from earlier traumas as a person passes a certain age?
sometimes the presence of a protein (tau in this case but I’m not sure if this is specifically true of tau) can act as a template for further production of the protein, as with prion diseases, and possibly with alzheimer’s… my bet would be that tau acts as a form of slow poison that triggers further tau buildup kind of like a progressive calcification of traumatized soft tissue…
the really horrifying thing is that if tau is the brains way of responding to injury, and you have kids being pushed into over aggressive contact sports at an early age, or teenagers going into full contact martial arts, the brain might be spitting out tau very young, causing a slow cascade of ruinous microscopic changes that begin to appear in the 20s or 30s…
Akin to the cardiovascular effects of high fat diets on kids… now thety’re talking about giving preteens statin drugs, especially the dangerously obese kids…
we may see a great surge in interest in neuroprotective medicines, perhaps anti-inflammatories that cross the blood brain barrier… some molecules in the cannanbinoid/anadamide family may help with this…