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Scientists stumbled onto a hint that measuring a toxic protein tied to Alzheimer’s disease just might one day be useful in diagnosing a different brain disease in football players and others who have suffered repeated blows to the head.

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Doctors evaluate symptoms such as mood swings and memory loss to try to tell if patients may have CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disease linked to concussions and other brain trauma. But other diseases cause similar symptoms, and a CTE diagnosis can only be confirmed by examining the brain after death.

The new clue involves a protein called tau that normally supports neurons but becomes abnormal in Alzheimer’s, tangling inside those nerve cells. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis were using autopsy samples to study a tau fragment called eMTBR-tau243 that may help track those tangles when they found something unusual: a patient with high levels of that biomarker even though records showed the person didn’t have Alzheimer