Astrocytic Disruption in Traumatic Brain Injury and Alzheimer's Disease

Traumatic brain injury TBI is a serious public health issue for those in active military duty as well as the general public. TBI produces a host of short- and long-term consequences, including diffuse axonal injury, tau aggregation, increased amyloid burden, and reactive astrocytosis. Many of these pathologies overlap with those observed in Alzheimers disease AD, with a growing body of evidence suggesting that TBI is a risk factor for AD. Using a TBI induction protocol that effectively models the injury sustained from an explosive impact, a common source of TBI for military personnel, we seek to characterize the convergence of TBI and AD. We hypothesized that reactive astrocytosis underlie the shared pathway to neuronal pathologies seen in TBI and AD. To this end, our results show the expected behavioral outcome from the blasted mice, however it is still too early in the study to make any concrete conclusions. We will continue our efforts to describe the convergence of TBI and AD by looking into synaptic changes associated with blast in hippocampal neurons and alterations in morphology and physiology of hippocampal astrocytes.