CLEVELAND — For those who play professional sports, getting injured is something that comes with the game.

But what happens when being an athlete poses a risk to your brain?

 

What You Need To Know

  • The Professional Athletes Brain Health Study has included more than 800 athletes

  • The athletes participate in mixed martial arts, boxing, and bull riding

  • The study is taking place out of the Cleveland Clinic's Lou Ruvo Center in Las Vegas


"They'll play sports, and then they're kind of OK for a while, and then all of the sudden a little bit later in their career or after their career, they'll start to develop signs and symptoms of dementia. It'll look a little like Alzheimer's but it's not Alzheimer's. Soz, something's going on in the brain," said Dr. Aaron Ritter.

That something is what Ritter and his colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic are trying to find out. For several years, the clinic and the UFC have been studying the brains of over 800 athletes in three different sports: Mixed martial arts, boxing, and bull riding.

"We have both men and women. That's one of the really unique things about professional fighting sports. It tends to be both men and women. So, we'll be able to look at the differences of how repetitive head trauma affects both men and women."

The study is taking place out of the Cleveland Clinic's Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas. The UFC is giving the clinic a $1 million contribution and committing to a five-year extension to the program to continue the research. Ritter said the contribution and program extension is valuable.

"It takes a lot to run this study. We have to do the brain scans and send the samples out. We send the blood samples to be analyzed by laboratories all over the world. We fly fighters in from places like Toronto in Canada and California and Florida to come to Las Vegas to do their visits."

As a lover of both sports and science, Ritter hopes the information collected in the study will help make playing sports safer for athletes.

"The study's really about trying to make sports and repetitive head trauma as safe as possible. So, we're trying to understand what is actually happening as the sort of result of repetitive head trauma to be able to prevent the negative effects."