Brain Injury Law Blog : Head Injury : Coma : Personal Injury : Las Vegas Nevada Lawyer & Attorney Tim Titolo

Las Vegas Brain Injury Blog

The result published in a Cambridge University Press article (2010) entitled Long Term Cognitive and Emotional Consequences of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury  reveals Mild TBI

"individuals had significant impairments in all cognitive domains compared to the healthy control subjects. The sizes of cognitive deficits were medium to large, and could not be accounted for by self-perceived deficits, depression, compensation claims or negative response bias. BDI scores were significantly higher in the patient group, and three patients fulfilled DSM-IV criteria for a mild episode of major depression.

 Conclusions. Primarily, well-recovered individuals who had sustained a minor trauma more than half a decade ago continue to have long-term cognitive and emotional sequelae relevant for everyday social and professional life. mTBI may lead to a lasting disruption of neurofunctional circuits not detectable by standard structural MRI and needs to be taken seriously in clinical and forensic evaluations."

The NY Times published an article about a writer who sustained an otherwise "mild" traumatic brain injury and suffered long term consequences.  Read the article A Brain Injury Discovered by clicking here.

"It didn’t occur to me to connect my symptoms with a minor accident I’d had in May, when I fell off my bike onto the grass, crunching my helmet. (At my checkup, the doctor and I had discussed this and another fall I’d taken, noting the curiosity that when you’re young you “fall,” but when you’re older you “have a fall.”)

But when there’s something wrong with your head, I’ve discovered, you may have no way of knowing there is something wrong with your head. And that Catch-22 can prove fatal.

Why Long Term Consequences of Traumatic Brain Injury Are Serious

 Even if you feel like a trauma leaves you in a state of confusion which may go away, it is important to consider long term consequences.  Many people in car accidents feel they are flustered or in shock when they really have symptoms related to traumatic brain injury.

If you find after discharge from the Emergency Room that your fogginess or confusion does not subside quickly, you should consult a personal injury attorney who specializes in understanding and representing brain injured clients to advise you of your options.  You should be directed to appropriate health providers who can evaluate your condition and decide if additional tests or therapy are required.

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I have seen the following article on Twitter all day.  I finally decided it was worth posting.  This is the source of the Twitter appearing as "Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, Not So Mild After All."  See Science Daily.  It appears to be a hot blog topic.

Douglas Smith, MD, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair and professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, will present information on the molecular mechanism at play in mild TBI (mTBI), commonly called concussions. Although mTBI affects over 1 million people each year in the United States, it is generally ignored as a major health issue. However, this 'mild' form of injury induces persisting neurological and cognitive problems in many of these patients, exacting an enormous emotional and financial toll on society.

Despite the prevalence and impact of mTBI, little is known about how mTBI affect nerve cells and connections in the brain, and therefore clinical outcomes after injury. Smith and colleagues have begun to amass data from human and animal studies on mTBI at 2-4 days after injury using advanced neuroimaging techniques. They have found distinct changes throughout the white matter in the brain. Also, protein markers of brain pathology were identified after mTBI in the blood of mTBI patients.

The team proposes a potential molecular mechanism to explain their findings. Specifically, they found that the stretching and disconnecting of nerve-cell axons after mTBI induces problems to the sodium channels found on the surface of neurons.

"This is not inconsequential," say Smith. "Indeed, the observation that brain pathology can be detected after a concussion calls for much more extensive efforts to prevent, diagnose, and treat mild traumatic brain injury."

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Pietrzak and colleagues published their study in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Mediates the Relationship Between Mild Traumatic Brain Injury and Health and Psychosocial Functioning in Veterans of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 2009;197(10):748-753).

The study, from Yale University, evaluated whether posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) mediated the relationship between mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) and general health ratings, psychosocial functioning, and perceived barriers to receiving mental healthcare 2 years following return from deployment in veterans of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF).

"Compared with respondents who screened negative for MTBI, respondents who screened positive for MTBI were younger, more likely to have PTSD, more likely to report fair/poor overall health and unmet medical and psychological needs, and scored higher on measures of psychosocial difficulties and perceived barriers to mental healthcare. Injuries involving loss of consciousness were associated with greater work-related difficulties and unmet psychological needs. PTSD mediated the relationship between MTBI and all of these outcomes." 

The researchers concluded: "These results underscore the importance of assessing PTSD in OEF/OIF veterans who screen positive for MTBI."

For additional information, contact R.H. Pietrzak, Yale University, School Medical, National Center PTSD, VA Connecticut Healthcare Systems, 950 Campbell Avenue 151E, West Haven, CT 06516, USA.
 

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Here is a book worth checking out on Mild Brain Injury http://www.learningstore.org/we1181.html

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Indiana National Guard Sgt. Gerald "G.J." Cassidy, who served his country in Bosnia and Iraq, died alone and ignored in a barracks at Fort Knox from an accidental drug overdose. His fate left a legacy that has changed the lives of thousands of wounded soldiers, Army officials say.

Cassidy began experiencing migraine headaches after a roadside bomb exploded about 11 feet from his Humvee in Iraq in August 2006. With diagnoses of post traumatic stress disorder and mild traumatic brain injury.

One Fort Knox soldier told investigators, "The staff at the WTU did not keep accountability of soldiers and were not making any checks on the welfare of soldiers" with PTSD and brain injury.

On the day Cassidy died, his platoon sergeant reported him at formation when he actually hadn't seen him for two days.

After repeated calls from Melissa Cassidy after she had not heard from him in a couple of days, Sgt. Cassidy was found dead in his chair. A toxicology report from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology ruled his death accidental, caused by "multi-drug toxicity," compounded by coronary artery disease.

Excerpted from Soldier's hospital death leads to changes as published in Associated Press.  Information from: The Courier-Journal, http://www.courier-journal.com

 

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