Brain Injury Association of America Position on Definition of Traumatic Brain Injury
The Brain Injury Association of America published its position paper on the definition of traumatic brain injury entitled Conceptualizing Brain Injury as a Chronic Disease. The organization tasked with providing legislation and lobbying for victims of traumatic brain injury, published its paper in 2009.
The gist of the paper is that traumatic brain injury is not an event but a process.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines an event as “the final result; the outcome.” The
Webster’s New World Dictionary defines an injury as “harm or damage.” Traumatic damage to the brain was therefore seen by the industry as an “event.” A broken brain was the equivalent of a broken bone—the final outcome to an insult in an isolated body system. Once it was fixed and given some therapy, no further treatment would be necessary in the near or distant future, and certainly, there would be no effect on other organs of the body.
The purpose of this paper is to encourage the classification of a TBI not as an event, not as the final outcome, but rather as the beginning of a disease process. The paper presents the scientific data supporting the fact that neither an acute TBI nor a chronic TBI is a static process—that a TBI impacts multiple organ systems, is disease causative and disease accelerative, and as such, should be paid for and managed on a par with other diseases.
- MORTALITY - The paper states that individuals with a TBI were twice as likely to die as a similar non-brain injured cohort and had a life expectancy reduction of seven years.
- ETIOLOGY - There is an indirect effect on other organs from traumatic brain injury.
- MORBIDITY - Individuals with a TBI are 1.5-17 times (depending on the severity of the TBI) more likely than the general population to develop seizures. Chances of getting epilepsy after traumatic brain injury increase and account for 5% of all epilepsy in the general population.
- INCONTINENCE
- PSYCHIATRIC DISEASE
- SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION
- MUSCULOSKELETAL DYSFUNCTION
