In this episode of Behind the Breakthroughs, Dr. Taylor Zuleger joins Melissa Deuber to discuss his innovative research using MRI technology to track brain changes in youth athletes. He shares how his personal history with sports injuries drives his quest to develop personalized rehabilitation strategies and better safety equipment for the next generation.
Relevant Articles/Media:
Gonzales, R. (2017, November 9). Researcher Says Aaron Hernandez's Brain Showed Signs Of Severe CTE. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/09/563194252/researcher-says-aaron-hernandez-s-brain-showed-signs-of-severe-cte
Zuleger, T. M., Slutsky-Ganesh, A. B., Kim, H., Anand, M., Warren, S. M., Grooms, D. R., Yuan, W., Riley, M. A., Gore, R. K., Myer, G. D., & Diekfuss, J. A. (2024). Differential neural mechanisms for movement adaptations following neuromuscular training in young female athletes with a history of sports-related concussion. Neuroscience, 558, 70–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2024.08.014
Melissa: Welcome to Behind the Breakthroughs. I'm Melissa Deuber from the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library. In each edition, we take a closer look at the research shaping health, healing, and human performance at Emory. Today's episode is part of the Off the Field series, where we explore how science moves from the lab to everyday life. I'm joined by Dr. Taylor Zuleger to talk about their work, the questions that drive it, and what it could make possible. Let's get started.
So, let's go ahead and start off with a brief introduction and what kind of got you into this field of research?
Dr. Zuleger: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. Um, again, my name is Taylor Zuleger. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow here at Emory SPARC. My background is actually neuroscience. So I do a lot of MRI-related things.
The main reason kind of why I got interested in this field is I'm a product of multiple concussions. So, back in the day, concussion rehab was stick you in a dark room until you're healed. So, a lot of my research and work has been trying to figure out how we help athletes recover better and faster.
Melissa: So, if you had to explain what you do on a daily basis or, you know, what a day in the life really is to a friend or family member who doesn't work in science, what would you say?
Dr. Zuleger: Yeah, it's a lot of moving parts, right? So, like I said, I use magnetic resonance imaging for a lot of the research that I do because we're really interested in like how the brain heals and recovers from injury. And part of, you know, one of the larger projects I have going on here is looking at repetitive head impacts in youth athletes, specifically male football players, and looking at how that might differ from kids that are in cross country. So, we have a study kind of right now going on with weekly neuroimaging and weekly behavioral assessments in these kids to try to look at how the brain changes over time.
Melissa: So, I'm assuming the question you're trying to answer when you started the study was kind of how the brain changes over time. Is there any additional information you're looking for?
Dr. Zuleger: Yeah, I mean, I think the big thing is right now if you kind of look across the sports literature as a whole, we know that concussion is bad, right? We also know that, at least now, repetitive head impacts are kind of being implemented in the progression of long-term neurological diseases and such.
So, if we've seen anything like the Aaron Hernandez stuff with CTE and whatnot, we want to try to figure out if we can kind of capture this earlier, especially in high school kids that have been, or even middle school kids that have been playing sports that involve head impacts over their lifetime and stuff like that. So, if we can kind of characterize maybe what those brain differences are, we can develop better rehabs, better protective mechanisms, and better sports equipment, that kind of thing.
Melissa: And I know there's a lot of public discussion on CTE and general protections for this. So, what was a challenge that you've had to overcome to complete this kind of experiment?
Dr. Zuleger: Yeah, so the study itself is a 14-time point study. So, corralling high school football athletes to say, "Give me an hour every Saturday," was very difficult. A lot of them were, you know, showing up in their pajamas or not on time.
And to basically say, "We're going to give you an MRI once a week, every week for 14 weeks," was kind of a very...it was a hurdle with parents initially because people often think MRI radiation, which is not the case. It's a big magnet, so it's completely safe, but there was just a lot of coordinating issues, I would say, with that study.
Melissa: Right. I can imagine. So, I know you've talked about your own experience with sports injuries, but was there a moment or experience that made you curious about this problem specifically?
Dr. Zuleger: Yeah, I think kind of as I alluded to before, you know, I've had a lot of concussions. I spent 20-plus years in martial arts and had a lot of like residual issues from concussions, traumatic brain injuries. And I think I was really kind of like, "How do we solve this problem?"
I think there's a greater issue too that we don't necessarily talk about. Here at SPARC, we talk about sports performance specifically, but there's also a mental health aspect I think to this that isn't really studied as much in the field. So, I kind of wanted to look at, you know, the whole human or the whole athlete and how we can essentially help them rehabilitate in a way that kind of works for them, more personalized and whatnot.
Melissa: Right. So, when people think about recovery, they tend to imagine a clear, linear progression. So, what have you learned about how unpredictable or maybe chaotic healing can actually be?
Dr. Zuleger: Yeah, it's so subjective. You will see kids that are, you know, three days out from concussion and they're like ready to go back, or they feel like they're ready to go back, you know? But then you'll see, primarily female athletes I've seen, that have these kind of much longer recovery trajectories.
So, you can have days where you're kind of up and down and you might be feeling, you know, like, "Oh, I'm ready to go back and play soccer," or "I'm ready to go back to basketball," but they can kind of have a relapse, so to speak. So, definitely, you know, we have a lot of things in place as far as how we treat concussion and what the trajectory of that recovery looks like, but it's definitely not linear by any means.
Melissa: Right. Well, thank you so much for your perspective. And thank you guys for joining us for this episode of Behind the Breakthroughs: Off the Field. I hope today's conversation offered a clearer look at the curiosity, care, and science behind the work happening at Emory.
If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to explore the rest of the series where each researcher brings a new perspective on injury prevention and human performance. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.