CTE ruins lives but can’t be confirmed until you’re dead. Canadian scientists are trying to change that

Dressed in a hospital gown, Brendan Hynes lies flat on his back inside an MRI machine in the basement research lab of Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. A technician reminds him to stay perfectly still and lets him know the hour-long scan is about to get started. 

"That means you’re going to start hearing those loud noises, OK?"

Hynes’s muffled "OK" comes back from inside the hollow chamber.

Then the noise starts — a thunderous womp, womp, womp on repeat. It's the sound of radio waves meeting a powerful magnetic field, letting scientists see inside the Canadian military veteran’s brain, damaged from 27 years of exposure to bomb blasts, saddling Hynes with severe symptoms that ended his career — and almost his life. 

After coping with panic attacks, thoughts of suicide and waves of barely controllable anger and depression, Hynes suspects he has chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). This incurable brain disease has been identified in hundreds of professional athletes. The Canadian army even listed it on Hynes’s release paperwork, but until he dies, no one can actually prove it. There’s simply no scientific way to confirm CTE until someone is already dead.

But what if that changed?

A team of Canadian scientists is trying to diagnose CTE in living people through a massive, years-long research project. Hynes is just one puzzle piece out of thousands of participants, all offering up their battered brains so researchers can figure out the hallmarks of this disease and find a way to identify it before it’s too late.

"Our goal is to be the first lab in the world to image CTE and be able to diagnose it in life so that we can stop the disease and reverse it," said researcher Neil Vasdev, director of the Brain