Have you ever hit your head on a rough surface or object? I bet you have and it felt terrible. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a common phenomenon that is caused by any sudden trauma causing damage to the brain. TBI can be induced through various ways such as when an individual's head suddenly hits a hard object or when a sharp object pierces the skull and damages the brain tissue. The symptoms of Traumatic Brain Injury vary based on the extent of the damage to the brain. The symptoms can be severe, moderate or even mild depending on the nature of the damage.
The most common causes of Traumatic Brain Injury include falls, motorcycle or crashes or vehicular accidents involving pedestrians. According to the recent statistics around 1.5-2 million children and adults suffers a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in the United States, (Taylor et al., 2017). Majority of these victims roughly 1.1 million suffer a mild injury that can be cured without necessarily going to the hospital. Approximately 235,000 individuals suffer a moderate injury while about 50,000 succumb to the injury.
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The mild, moderate, and severe traumatic brain injuries based on mechanism and severity of the injury has distinct symptoms. For the mild injury, the symptoms include brief loss of consciousness, headache, memory loss, disorientation as well as confusion. The symptoms of moderate traumatic brain injury include loss of consciousness that can last for around 25 minutes to 6 hours depending on several factors, some brain bleeding and swelling that cause arousable sleepiness (Marshall et al., 2015). During this situation the individual is lethargic and only external stimulation can open them the eyes. For the severe traumatic brain injury, the individual is unconscious, and even the external stimulus cannot open the eyes. The person suffers a loss of consciousness for more than 6 hours.
There are several types of traumatic brain injuries including a concussion, contusion, diffuse axonal injury (DAI), traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage (tSAH) and hematoma. A concussion is the most common one, and it's a mild brain injury that causes a brief loss of consciousness, and it is not associated with permanent brain injury. A bruise causes contusion which is also known as contrecoup or coup to a specific brain area due to a sudden head impact. For the case of contrecoup injuries, the brain is injured on the opposite side of the impact while for the coup injuries the injury occurs directly under the area of impact. Diffuse axonal injury is a cellular stretching and shearing of the nerve cells. It is caused by sudden movement of the brain inside the skull leading to the damaged of nerve axons. Therefore, the physical impact can cause blood vessels in the brain to rapture, and the severity of the condition depends on the location of the clot. a blood clot as a result of a ruptured blood vessel is known as a hematoma. A large hematoma may compress the brain and interfere with the normal functioning of the brain.
Apart from the temporary consequences which have been outlined above as symptoms, there are several long-term consequences especially associated with moderate and severe TBI. These long-term consequences include social isolation, suicide, aggression, depression, cognitive deficits, seizures, psychosis, hypopituitarism as well as progressive dementia.
TBI has fatal consequences; thus, we have to be careful and prevent it. Some of the ways to avoid TBI include wearing seat belts in the motor vehicle, using an appropriate child safety seat, never drive under the influence of alcohol as well as wear the proper protective gear while participating in sports (Carney et al., 2017). Observing these measures and many more will reduce the chance of suffering from TBI.
References
Carney, N., Totten, A. M., O'reilly, C., Ullman, J. S., Hawryluk, G. W., Bell, M. J., ... & Rubiano, A. M. (2017). Guidelines for the management of severe traumatic brain injury. Neurosurgery, 80(1), 6-15.
Marshall, S., Bayley, M., McCullagh, S., Velikonja, D., Berrigan, L., Ouchterlony, D., & Weegar, K. (2015). Updated clinical practice guidelines for concussion/mild traumatic brain injury and persistent symptoms. Brain Injury, 29(6), 688-700.
Taylor, C. A., Bell, J. M., Breiding, M. J., & Xu, L. (2017). Traumatic Brain Injury-Related Emergency Department Visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths-United States, 2007 and 2013. Morbidity and mortality weekly report. Surveillance summaries (Washington, DC: 2002), 66(9), 1-16.
