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In My double life, Kiwis share the side hustles, the hobbies or the dual careers that keep them busy. Helen Murray is a neuroscientist based at the University of Auckland’s Centre for Brain Research and a representative ice hockey player who once captained the NZ women’s team, the Ice Fernz.
“My research looks at the biology that links repetitive head injuries and neurodegeneration or different types of dementia. In another part of my life, I am an ice hockey player. I captained the Ice Fernz from 2016 – 2022. I still play competitively, but I’m slowly pulling back from the international side of ice hockey because my work is demanding more of my time.
How I got into this work is a personal story.
On one hand, it came through sport. I’ve injured my ankle pretty badly and had to have it operated on but as for head injuries, I’ve only had a couple of smaller concussions. I’ve never had a head injury that’s put me out for an extended period of time, although I have a couple of friends who have. We wear helmets and cages which protect the face, but they can’t protect our brain from bouncing around.
But I think the real reason I chose medical research is because my dad, Brent, was diagnosed with cancer when I was 15 and passed away that same year. I think it made me a little bit cynical about medicine. I was frustrated, I think, because it couldn’t save him.
That got me quite interested in research and how we can make things better. I’d always been interested in science, but Dad’s death galvanised me to want to be in research rather than clinical medicine.
So, I credit Dad with getting me interested in research and I credit Mum, Moira, for keeping me in research. My mum has an insane work ethic and I think I inherited that from her.
I thought I wanted to be a vet. And then, at some point, we had to put our cat down and I was like, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this.’
I am studying chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of dementia associated with repetitive head injuries. It’s been most associated with sport, but it could arise in those subjected to domestic violence or those experiencing blast injury in the military.
CTE isn’t just caused by concussion; even minor collisions can cause a violent movement of the brain, which creates microscopic damage to the brain’s tissue that builds up over time.
Originally, I was studying Alzheimer’s disease during my PhD in New Zealand. In my first postdoctoral fellowship in the United States, I looked at some of the earliest brain regions that are affected by Alzheimer’s, and what could be some of the earliest triggers for neurodegeneration.
Brain injury kept coming up in a lot of my reading, and it’s something I had – have – an interest in because of my sport. I came back to NZ in 2019 to join up with the Ice Fernz and happened to get back here on the same day that Professor Richard Faull [of the University of Auckland’s Centre for Brain Research] launched the NZ Sports Human Brain Bank.
I popped into the launch event and heard a colleague from Australia talking about CTE. It was like a lightbulb moment, in that I realised I had similar expertise in brain pathology and here’s a condition related to brain injury, which I had a personal interest in, so this was what I needed to do with my life.
Right now, CTE can’t be diagnosed until after a person has died, so the sports brain bank collects tissue from donors who played contact sports, with or without dementia symptoms, and others who have never played sport to look for differences in their brains.
I use a method of tissue labelling that I developed during a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC; I was able to bring it back here to Auckland when I returned.
We’re looking for biomarkers, biological molecules that indicate damage in the brain. Hopefully one day, these biomarkers can be measured with a blood test to find out if a sportsperson has brain changes and if we catch this before symptoms start, we might be able to intervene early.
This year, we confirmed NZ’s first case of CTE in a professional rugby player, in Billy Guyton [a former Blues and NZ Māori halfback]. There are clinical criteria that can help us give a diagnosis of “probable CTE” in living people, which is what’s happened in recent years with some former professional sportspeople like ex-All Black Carl Hayman.
It hasn’t put me off playing a contact sport, but I think the more we learn, the more we’re perhaps playing sport differently.
I started playing inline hockey – a similar sport, only on inline skates and not on ice – when I was about 10. It’s convenient to play when there’s no ice and we’re in a country that doesn’t have a lot of ice rinks.
My family was into inline hockey – my dad and my brother – so I kind of followed along. As I got older I wanted to be a bit more competitive, and a lot of my friends had gone to ice hockey, so I switched over. It helped that we lived up the road from the Paradice Ice Skating Rink in Botany [East Auckland].
It took a bit of adjusting, but I just fell in love with the skating. It makes for a very fluid game… I was about 20, so quite late for ice hockey. I could ice skate, but I needed to fine tune some skills and adjust to the game play. I sort of joke that when I first made the Ice Fernz, I hadn’t actually learned how to stop. I was a bit gung-ho and just sort of went for it.
It all resonated with me because the Ice Fernz is a very special team, with a lot of history – a lot of mana – and the tournaments we were going to were just incredible. The ice hockey scene here is quite small, but it’s a community of like-minded and passionate people.”
