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In Brief
- Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is deemed mild, moderate or severe based on its immediate consequences rather than its long-term effects. Thus, some patients diagnosed with severe TBI—because they spent four days in a coma, for example—eventually return to work without incident, whereas some 10 to 15 percent of civilian patients who sustained mild TBI never fully recover from its effects.
- Blunt-force trauma can damage the brain by bruising it, stretching or tearing nerve cells, or triggering electrical misfiring. The pressure waves unleashed by explosions can also induce brain damage, even in cases where a soldier’s head did not strike a solid object.
- A blast strong enough to cause TBI is also powerful enough to produce emotional trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The combination of mild TBI and PTSD is considered the signature injury of the Iraq War.
- The growing appreciation of the problem of mild TBI is spawning research into treatments, which may include antiepilepsy medications and various forms of psychotherapy.
As a combat engineer in Iraq, Jeremy was supposed to find roadside bombs. They found him instead. Within 72 hours of each other, two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) went off within 15 feet of this father in his late 20s. The first set of blast waves, a moving wall of highly compressed air that emanates from an explosion, knocked him out briefly. The second left him dazed for about 30 minutes and produced ringing in his ears that disappeared within a week. These detonations did not visibly injure Jeremy (not his real name)—but he was never the same.
After his tour in Iraq, Jeremy became more irritable with his spouse and child. At his job as a manager of a national firm, he would get very frustrated when customers were abrupt or business was brisk. Jeremy’s memory had deteriorated, too, and he had to use a daily planner to remind himself of even the most basic tasks. He also had incapacitating headaches, spells of panic or confusion, mood swings, and sensory illusions such as a metallic taste or ringing in his ears. Neuropsychological tests revealed that Jeremy had real deficits in mental processing, attention and short-term verbal memory.
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8 Comments
Add CommentI suffered a sever fall many year ago. MTBI symptoms have been present but were never realized until the intense chronic pain i suffered for 12 years was 'removed'. Then I became aware of MTBI. Further procedures have made incredible difference in cognitive function for me. I'm trying to tell the VA. "NeuroCranial Restructuring" can have amazing positive results in this category - it's a crime that nobody knows it exists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThankfully it is now considered a criminal act to give a child 'a good shaking' to punish it for misbehaviour. One shudders to imagine the widespread minor traumatisms infilicted on such fragile brains.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe side impact in an auto crash is allowed to be 85 G's according to the NHTSA rules. This is much too high to be safe, but is the best that can be done with current car designs and side curtain air bags.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have invented a way to make the number as low as 20 G's.
Please see my website www.safersmallcars.com
and help me if you can.
Traumatizing experiences caused by war are often very dramatic and the neural imprints often so distinctly symptom-generating that they are easy pickings for psychologists and science journalists...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, the sweeping significance of psychologically traumatizing predicaments that has never been strongly and clearly "spelled out" except in the form of an exceptionally prudent (though pun filled) terminology, approximately as follows:
1. Individuals that "end up in them" were neither capable of avoiding "getting into" them nor capable of physically escaping from or aggressively removing or neutralizing the environmental source(s) of stimulation [or stressor-components(s)] of such potentially overtaxing ordeals
2. Slowly as well as suddenly eventuating traumatizing predicaments can and do happen.
3. All genuinely psychologically traumatizing lifetime challenges do only have any chance of being "adaptively" (especially meant in a Darwinian sense) handled given the existence of inhibitory neural mechanisms (allowing what may be described as "Specific/synaptic Hibernation" (SH)) that prevents a fatally futile or self-defeating somatic (e.g. inflamatory), and/or emotional, and/or a flight or fight type sceletomuscular, response activity (or corresponding actention ).
[Because of the dearth of a for this topic *appropriate* terminology one that defines and enables a reliable grasp (largely an 'Evolutionary Psychophysiology type' grasp) of this and all reasonably closely related aspects of What Is {was, is, and will be going on} - I have endeavored to engineer precisely the kind of etymologically pioneering terminology required. %}]
In a partly acronymic nutshell (one intended to provide ameliorating mirth by some deceptively nutty sem_antics (in order to not be so hard to take that it gets needlessly off-putting):
We have evolved to be[have] as AEVASIVE[ly] as we are, largely because the in our phylogeny largely obviously involved aspects of the Evolutionary Patterning (or pressure) Totality (EPT) were that "Opportunity type" environmental (+ of course intrinsic) aspects of EPT came to overlap significantly with "SH imploring (SHI) type predicaments (classified as "Adversity type" aspect of EPT) and with the by SHI type predicaments normally inevitably 'put' Pain =imprints implied by "PTSD"=by SHI-type challenges conditioned-in, unconsciously reverberating states, effecting symptoms [concEPTualized as "CURSES"] within the Actention (Selection Serving) System (brain/CNS) of our ancestors (as SHI-type ordeals do nowadays).
Traumatizing experiences caused by war are often very dramatic and the neural imprints often so distinctly symptom-generating that they are easy pickings for psychologists and science journalists...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, the sweeping significance of psychologically traumatizing predicaments that has never been strongly and clearly "spelled out" except in the form of an exceptionally prudent (though pun filled) terminology, approximately as follows:
1. Individuals that "end up in them" were neither capable of avoiding "getting into" them nor capable of physically escaping from or aggressively removing or neutralizing the environmental source(s) of stimulation [or stressor-components(s)] of such potentially overtaxing ordeals
2. Slowly as well as suddenly eventuating traumatizing predicaments can and do happen.
3. All genuinely psychologically traumatizing lifetime challenges do only have any chance of being "adaptively" (especially meant in a Darwinian sense) handled given the existence of inhibitory neural mechanisms (allowing what may be described as "Specific/synaptic Hibernation" (SH)) that prevents a fatally futile or self-defeating somatic (e.g. inflamatory), and/or emotional, and/or a flight or fight type sceletomuscular, response activity (or corresponding “actention”).
[Because of the dearth of a for this topic *appropriate* terminology – one that defines and enables a reliable grasp (largely an 'Evolutionary Psychophysiology type' grasp) of this and all reasonably closely related aspects of What Is {was, is, and will be going on} - I have endeavored to engineer precisely the kind of etymologically pioneering terminology required. %}]
In a partly acronymic nutshell (one intended to provide ameliorating mirth by some deceptively nutty sem_antics (in order to not be so hard to take that it gets needlessly off-putting):
We have evolved to be[have] as AEVASIVE[ly] as we are, largely because the in our phylogeny largely obviously involved aspects of the Evolutionary Patterning (or pressure) Totality (EPT) were that "Opportunity type" environmental (+ of course intrinsic) aspects of EPT came to overlap significantly with "SH imploring” (SHI) type predicaments (classified as "Adversity type" aspect of EPT) and with the by SHI type predicaments normally inevitably 'put' “Pain”=imprints implied by "PTSD"=by SHI-type challenges “conditioned-in, unconsciously reverberating states, effecting symptoms” [concEPTualized as "CURSES"] within the Actention (Selection Serving) System (brain/CNS) of our ancestors (as SHI-type ordeals do nowadays).
What about the thousands of Kurds slain by Saddam Hussein? The thousands slain at the hands of Al Queada, or many more under Jihad in general? There goals coming from their own leader's mouths is to take down all of Western civilization. I don't necessarily agree with Israel's hawkish stance or the US response to Sept 9.11, but you can't blame just one side. Can we? Can we allow peace so we aren't seeing so many traumatic war injuries?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBrain traumatic lesion is e serious and frequent disorder, also in sport. Early diagnosing brain injury plays a central role in minimising its danger. No Phyisician are able to apply quickly a clinical method, I have illustrated in previous paper: Quantum Biophysical Semeiotics plays a central role in predicting intracranial findings on CT-scans; http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/11/143/comments.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne factor which seems to be overlooked is the fact when one is presented with an 'blast wave injury' is the fact the explosion causes a spill of blood in the brain. THAT is why the results of an explosive injury is the SAME as one which is induced by a traumatic brain injury. This spill of blood is evidenced in the blood in the eye when one is presented with the 'blast wave' injury as opposed to an 'impact' injury on the brain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe blast wave causes a spill of blood and the impact injury also causes a spill of blood.
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