Headbutting rams could boost brain research

Could ram brains shed light on the long-term impacts of sportspeople suffering repeated head blows?

That’s a question Dr Helen Murray from the University of Auckland’s Centre for Brain Research will investigate after receiving the inaugural Dame Rosie Horton Fellowship.

The $283,000 fellowship will allow Murray to see whether the brains of headbutting rams can be used to gain a better understanding of how repeated head injuries affect the brain.

“We needed a proper model of repeated head injuries, then I met a ram breeder at the national Fieldays in June and she told me how frequently rams headbutt each other.

“Noone has ever done this type of research before, so it’s a very blue-sky idea, but sheep have a lot of promise as a model of repeated head injury,” says Murray.

Centre for Brain Research geneticist Professor Russell Snell has used sheep for research on Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, so this also inspired Murray’s project.

She plans to use surveillance cameras and activity tracking collars to observe rams headbutting at the University’s Ngapouri Research Farm, collaborating with Dr Mark Oliver, the farm's research manager.

“We will need to measure how frequently each ram headbutts, and to have a control group of non-headbutting sheep to compare with.

“After the rams are euthanised, we plan to examine their brains to see if they have any signs of changes that resemble the degenerative brain conditions we see in humans who have had repetitive brain injuries,” Murray says.

Repeated blows to the head are often experienced by rugby players, boxers and other athletes, family violence victims, and military personnel.

This increases their risks of later developing brain diseases, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and frontotemporal dementia, says Murray.

“New Zealanders have such a passion for contact sports, so a lot of people in the country are experiencing repetitive head impacts – it’s something that affects pretty much anyone who plays a contact sport.

“By looking at what’s going on in the brain, we want to be able to figure out who is most at risk.”

The research on headbutting rams will expand the work Murray has been doing over the past four years, using human brain tissue donated to the Neurological Foundation New Zealand Human Brain Bank and international brain banks.

Earlier this year, Murray and PhD student Chelsie Osterman made a breakthrough in understanding chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), by examining tissue from brains donated by former rugby players and other sportspeople.

They found a unique signature of inflammatory markers in the brains of people with CTE.

Currently, CTE can only be diagnosed after death, but Murray and Osterman’s insights take them a step nearer to being able to detect CTE in living patients.

“Once we can identify the signature of degenerative brain disease in people who have these repeated head knocks, we can develop blood tests and brain scans to diagnose it as early as possible.

“That would allow people to take steps to prevent damage getting worse and helps pave the way to developing treatments,” she says.

Murray hopes the ram brains might offer new insights into how repetitive injuries affect the brain over time.

“They are good models of repeated injury because they headbutt aggressively, can live for about 10 years, and have the same folded brain structure as humans.”

Murray’s personal experiences motivated her to launch New Zealand’s first research programme dedicated to understanding the impacts of repeated brain injuries.

During her 12 years playing ice hockey for the New Zealand Ice Fernz, she saw teammates suffering the effects of repeated concussions. A former Ice Fernz captain, the 35-year-old still plays for the Auckland Steel national women’s league team.

When Centre for Brain Research Director Distinguished Professor Sir Richard Faull and Professor Maurice Curtis launched the New Zealand Sports Human Brain Bank in 2019, Murray put her passions for sport and brain research together.

“As an athlete, I know that if there was a test to see how your brain is handling collisions, that would be valuable information, because right now, we have no idea,” Murray says.

The research could help identify exactly what makes head blows lead to long-term brain conditions for some players, while others remain healthy.

“We want to figure out how many people are affected and how to develop meaningful policies to improve sport safety,” she says.

Michael Horton established the Dame Rosie Horton Fellowship to continue his late wife’s legacy of supporting medical research and other social causes.

After completing her Neurological Foundation Senior Research Fellowship, Murray will take up the Dame Rosie Horton Fellowship late next year.

Learn more about animal research at the University of Auckland.