Orlando doctor makes breakthrough in concussion research

ORLANDO (FOX 13) - Whether you're a professional football player or on a youth soccer team, concussions are a big concern.

"I never like to see somebody hit their head, it makes me cringe," Dr. Linda Papa, an emergency room physician at Orlando Regional Medical Center explained.

She has been studying traumatic brain injuries for the past 15 years. 

She said, for some, concussions may have a lingering effect.

"There's so many people who leave emergency departments that have concussions who never really acknowledged as having this injury. It affects their relationship with their children, with their spouse, it affects their work, and they don't know what's going on because nobody has acknowledged that they had a problem," Dr. Papa said. 

Now, she hopes a simple blood test will change all that. 

For more information on preventing brain injuries, visit http://www.cdc.gov/headsup/basics/concussion_prevention.html

She and a team of researchers have found a specific protein in the liquid part of the blood, called serum, in 94-percent of patients with evidence of a concussion.

The protein comes from the supporting cells in the brain called GFAP, short for glial fibrillary acidic protein. 

"Normally, you don't find GFAP in the system, but after an injury, once the brain is jostled, these proteins are released from the damaged cells and they leak out into the periphery of the brain, into the cerebral spinal fluid and then translate into the serum," she explains. 

The worse the trauma, the more GFAP they find in the blood. 

"So there's this beautiful graded response as the level of injury goes up the higher the bio marker increases," Dr. Papa explained.

When they compared it to serum of other trauma patients who didn't hit their head, the protein wasn't there. 

More studies are being done to see if GFAP can be used to monitor recovery.