Schon leichte Schläge auf den Kopf stören das Mikrobiom
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01504-w
Schon leichte Schläge auf den Kopf stören das Mikrobiom
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01504-w
5 Kommentare
This paper In PloS one [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0345651] says non-concussive head impacts in college football players may still mess with the gut microbiome, even when there is no diagnosed concussion. The takeaway is that head impacts were linked to shifts in bacterial diversity and composition, especially about 48 to 72 hours after harder hits, which points to a possible brain gut axis effect.
They tracked 6 NCAA Division I players across a season and analyzed 226 fecal samples with 16S rRNA sequencing, plus mixed-effects models to control for stuff like player load, NSAID use, sleep, stress, and supplements. After substantial impact exposure, Bray-Curtis dissimilarity went up, meaning the microbiome moved away from baseline, and that seasonal drift also suggested a cumulative effect from repeated hits. At the taxon level, lower Prevotellaceae and Prevotella and higher Ruminococcus and sometimes Verrucomicrobiales showed up after impacts, though some associations got weaker after multiple testing correction and compositional data checks. Faith’s phylogenetic diversity did not change much, so the signal was more about community composition than total within sample diversity.
The study is useful but pretty small; so it is correlational, not causal, still, it gives a solid technical hint that repeated sub-concussive hits may trigger dysbiosis and inflammatory pathways, which could matter for long-term neurological risk.
RN here – tackle football is much more dangerous than anyone is ready to admit or accept. The amount of parents who bring their child in for symptoms suspicious for concussion/brain injury who ask when their son can go back out on the field is sickening to me.
EDIT – just to head off any questions, we do get girls in with cheerleading/rugby/soccer concussions/head injuries/brain injuries and parents are MUCH (like 90%) more likely to listen to the provide/nurse about restrictions/limitations for their sport.
Last Podcast on the Left did a series on Aaron Hernandez, but it’s also a series about CTE. Great and eye opening series. Now I know that no kids should be playing full contact football. They’ve already found CTE in high schoolers (after their death). Disturbing stuff and of course football is big money, so the NFL has done everything it can to hide all the studies and done their “own research” of course.
This headline is absurd overreach by Nature News. It’s very silly for an outlet like them to even bother reporting on this tiny paper, let alone directly claim causality.
n=6, no control group, heavy confounding by at a minimum physiology, diet/supplements/NSAIDs/exercise, and the main mixed-effects association between head impact load and Bray–Curtis microbiome dissimilarity doesn’t survive FDR correction (p=0.1447).
There is no good evidence that blows to the head per se mediate any microbiome disruption. This is extremely early, limited work.
NB: not a comment on the actual dangers of repeated TBI at all…
What is considered a mild blow (I’m not paying for this)