Wrestlers' Brain Signs Point to Repetitive Hits

A team studied brain scans. The team looked at 52 male Japanese professional wrestlers. The wrestlers got MRI scans in 2022. The team searched for a brain issue. The issue had a name. It was an outer midbrain lesion. The team set a size rule. The mark had to be 2 millimeters or more across.

The team also looked at older MRI dates. It watched how the marks changed. The team used 91 people as a comparison group. Those people had spinal cord injury or central poststroke pain. The team got that data from an earlier study. The marks were not found in those people. The marks showed up only in wrestlers over 40. The control group did not have them. Even older controls lacked them.

The team found marks in 12 wrestlers. That was 23.1 percent of the group. No other brain area had traumatic marks. The marks were only in the midbrain. The marks grew over time. The team saw this on longitudinal MRI. The marks were not tied to a recorded symptomatic brain injury. They were tied to career length. One more year of pro wrestling was linked to a 14 percent increase in mark prevalence. The odds ratio was 1.14. The confidence interval was 1.08 to 1.19.

The team said the marks were neural changes. These changes likely came from repeated mild brain injuries. The team said this was the first study. It showed midbrain risk from real wrestling data.