Speaker

Jay Venkatraman, Wayne State University

Abstract

A sub-concussive impact is defined as a bump, blow or jolt to the head, not resulting in any apparent physiological symptoms. These impacts are generally overlooked in contact sports like football, boxing, MMA, hockey, soccer etc. because a single impact does not have any clinically noticeable effects. Long-term exposure to any level of TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) may begin with onset of symptoms like headache, nausea, blurry vision, slurred speech, memory impairment and eventually lead to development of severe neurodegenerative diseases like dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s. Very little knowledge exists on the direct correlation between these subconcussive events and the resulting neurophysiological effects. Currently, there is no well-established animal model to deliver and study the effects of closed head sub-concussive head impacts. Our overall research goal is to identify injury thresholds for repetitive subconcussive impacts both in terms of magnitude and number of impacts. A modified version of the Marmarou model was developed to replicate the delivery of sub-concussive head impacts on rats which showed the effects of single versus repetitive sub-concussive head impacts. To make the impacts repeatable, a controlled cortical impactor was used to deliver impacts and Barnes maze was used as the behavioral assessment tool to study the short-term effects of sub-concussive impacts in rats.

Biography

Jay Venkatraman is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering with a specialization in biomechanics. His area of research is studying the effects of repetitive sub-concussive head injuries in behavioral and neurophysiological response. He has been developing the impact delivery mechanism on small animal models to observe its effects behaviorally and at the cellular level. In an effort to improve the understanding of such impacts in contact sports, he has been working with human volunteers to assess their neurophysiological changes over a year.