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Chyna’s Brain Donated for Brain Injury Research

Chyna’s legacy will live on. The former WWE star’s brain will be donated for brain injury research in the wake of her death earlier this month at age 46.

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“We want to donate her brain,” Chyna’s manager, Anthony Anzaldo, revealed in a Friday, April 22, interview with the New York Daily News. “We want to know what made Chyna tick.”

Anzaldo has since confirmed to Los Angeles’ NBC4 that Chyna’s brain has been handed over to researcher Dr. Bennet Omalu to determine whether the wrestling icon icon suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is caused by repeated impact to the head.

Chyna
Chyna on ‘The Tonight Show With Jay Leno’ in 2000.

Chyna (real name: Joan Marie Laurer) received a number of blows to her skull during her time in the ring as a pro wrestler, a portion of her career that spanned from the ’90s until she was released from the WWE in 2001.

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Anzaldo told the New York Daily News that lawyers reached out to him prior to Chyna’s death to see if she’d be interested in joining a brain injury lawsuit against the WWE. While Chyna didn’t want to participate, she and Anzaldo were fascinated by the science.

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Chyna at the 51st Annual Primetime Emmy Awards.

As Us Weekly previously reported, Chyna was found dead last Wednesday in her Redondo Beach, California, home. An autopsy has been performed; the results are still pending. Toxicology tests are expected to take weeks to complete, and cause of death will not be finalized until then.

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After retiring from the world of wrestling, Chyna posed for Playboy and appeared in adult films and on reality TV, including the shows The Surreal Life and Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew. Most recently, she was working as an English teacher in Japan.

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