Rams, which frequently butt heads, will provide Auckland University's centre for brain research a model population to study. Photo: Mark Boulton / Biosphoto via AFP
It is hoped rams' brains may help researchers better understand the long term consequences of repeated head blows on sports people.
Rams, which frequently butt heads, will provide Auckland University's centre for brain research a model population to study.
Sheep have been used for brain research before, but not like this.
Repeated blows to the head often experienced in contact sport have been found to increase the risk of brain diseases, like CTE and forms of dementia.
Auckland University senior research fellow Dr Helen Murray told Checkpoint the idea was first pitched to her at Fieldays, making it "quite the Kiwi" origin story.
"Some asked me, have you had a look at sheep before, because they usually do quite a lot of head butting."
It is sheep's brain structure that makes them ideal when trying to mirror the human brain.
"One of the great reasons that we use sheep for modelling a few different degenerative brain diseases is because they have this wonderful, folded brain structure like we do as humans," Dr Murray said.
"That's really important when we're studying brain injury because the physics of how that injury actually impacts the brain is quite similar in sheep as it is to humans."
Murray said the study is in its early days, with researchers currently monitoring the variability and frequency of ram's head butts.
"We're going to be monitoring them with video cameras and some collars... then we can use that to then plot a bigger study that we'll look at longer term, what's happening in their brain."
While sheep have much thicker skulls than humans, making them more protected from head knocks, their brains are situated similarly to humans.
"We would probably end up with a skull fracture if humans tried to do this, but the sheep are still the same in the sense that their brain is floating around inside their skull, just like a human. So, the force that's going through the brain and those impacts is pretty similar."
Murray said the main challenge researchers are facing when it comes to degenerative brain disease is not being able to establish at what point changes are occurring in the brain.
"Most of the work that we're doing right now is looking at the brains of people after they've passed away. We're trying to understand what is changing when someone's had these repetitive head impacts and how is that leading to an increased risk of degenerative brain disease - but that's at the end of someone's life."
"If we want to understand the timeline of those changes with these rams, they'll give us an idea of at what point are things going wrong, and when can we intervene, and when can we potentially pick up that there's changes happening."
The main goal of the research is to be able to establish early on whether someone is suffering from a degenerative brain disease.
"What the families of our brain donors tell us is that they wish they had a diagnosis, something they could have measured to say, look, my loved one is actually going through something that's a progressive brain disease," Murray said.
"We're trying to what we call biomarkers, something that we can measure something from, say the blood or an MRI scan that will help us determine that what's going on is actually potentially going to get worse over time. Hopefully the rams are going to give us an idea of what those biomarkers might be."
Murray said that it was currently hard to know what sort of degenerative diseases sheep were developing due to their short lives in farming situations.
However, researchers have previously concluded that sheep do have the same brain structure to develop Alzheimer's disease if you let them live long enough.
"So now the question is, is that accelerated in the rams? Which is what we think is happening."
This study is still in its early stages but once researchers have finished monitoring how frequently head butting is happening among the rams, the next step will be to take blood samples and put them in the MRI to examine what the effects have been.
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