Traumatic Brain Injury Affects Movement
Can Traumatic Brain Injury Affect my Movement?
Yes. Traumatic Brain Injury can affect the motor function of your brain. This could seriously affect those of us who depend on specific coordination in work or social situations.
Research shows that parts of your brain that are not involved in a direct impact can still be injured. This is due to the diffuse nature of traumatic brain injury. A large proportion of survivors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) have persistent cognitive impairments, the profile of which does not always correspond to the size and location of injuries. One possible explanation could be that TBI-induced damage extends beyond obvious lesion sites to affect remote brain networks.
If you find yourself with a blow to the head, or in a traumatic event where you are uncertain if you hit your head, pay attention to things like balance, coordination and subtle movement changes. You may have injured the motor function of your brain.
Research Using Functional MRI
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center conducted tests with Functional MRI (fMRI). Observations suggest that patients display compromised activation and connectivity patterns during the finger-thumb opposition task, which may imply functional reorganization of motor networks following TBI.
Functional MRI versus Positron Emission Tomography
Functional MRI is based on the increase in blood flow and neural activity in the brain. The main advantages to fMRI as a technique to image brain activity related to a specific task or sensory process include 1) the signal does not require injections of radioactive isotopes, 2) the total scan time required can be very short, and 3) the in-plane resolution of the functional image is very small.
To put these advantages in perspective, functional images obtained by the earlier method of positron emission tomography, PET, require injections of radioactive isotopes, multiple acquisitions, and, therefore, extended imaging times. Further, the expected resolution of PET images is much larger than the usual fMRI pixel size. Additionally, PET usually requires that multiple individual brain images are combined in order to obtain a reliable signal. Consequently, information on a single patient is compromised and limited to a finite number of imaging sessions.
See the article in Neurology.
