Blast Induced Traumatic Brain Injury Analysis

After the long and physically demanding battles of World War Two, many soldiers returned to the United States of America battling injuries many physicians did not know how to acknowledge at the time. But, as many soldiers were able to return to their families, even with a brain injury, many soldiers lost their lives to brain injuries. Two researchers who conducted one of the largest studies on base camps about the extent of brain injuries and how it affected soldiers was Sekulovic and Ceramilac, these researchers were able to “summaries autopsies of 499 deaths occurring within 30 days of traumatic brain injury.”1 Sekulovic and Ceramilac were able to find “that 78% of the deaths were due to injury to brain stem, brain edema or brain compression.”1 While Sekulovic and Ceramilac were able to determine the percentage of which were affected by brain injuries during World War Two, many researchers were hoping to acknowledge the dynamic longer term possibilities. According to Dr. Ian J. Baguley, “patients who had been released from the hospital into rehabilitation facilities”1 were considered long term for brain injuries. Where as Dr. Robert M. Shavelle found that patients coming from war can be classified as long term as long as the effects lasted “one year or longer post injury.”1 Many studies by various researchers were also able to discover that “even in long-term, death rates from many different causes are elevated for persons with [traumatic brain injury] by comparison with

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a type of injury that is a critical public health and socio-economic problem. TBI is a leading cause of death and disability in both children and adults [5]. The Centers for Disease Control and

The effects of war are often very lessen, some factions wanting to downplay those effects in order to support your efforts and others wanting to inflate them in order to support peace. There is a disagreement in terms of persistent post concussive symptoms that are reported by Iraq combat veteran who have had repeated episodes of mild traumatic brain injury from being in close proximity to explosive blasts. This represents functional and structural brain damage and may also present with epiphenomenon of comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder

“Every war has its signature wound. In World War I it was poison gas damaged lungs. In World War II it was radiation that caused cancer. In Vietnam in was Agent Orange that caused neurological damage and skin disorders; and for the Iraq and Afghanistan Conflicts it is TBI. Since August 2007, when screening for TBI, 83% of wounded troops were diagnosed with TBI, the largest group being 21 year-olds.”(Driscoll) In recent events and in the news, PTSD and TBI is getting more and more

service members who have been deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan have returned with an range of signs and symptoms that we are now calling post-deployment syndrome (PDS). Traumatic brain injury, combat stress, blast injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, or post-concussive syndrome each fit into the variety of symptoms called PDS. Four hundred thousand previously healthy service men and women now live with PDS that, at times, causes them to be entirely disabled or to suffer so much that they even may take their own lives. This number may seem shocking, however PDS doesn’t just affect these service members, reservists, and veterans, but also their friends, family members, employers, communities, and even the very health care workers who are desperately trying to help them. Surprisingly, despite how common this condition is, it still remains puzzling to fully define and

In order to understand the origin of concussions, one must first understand how the head is affected by contact forces. When the head strikes or is struck by an object, both contact and inertial forces are applied to head (Meaney). These forces can cause injury to the brain both in close proximity to the impact zone or at more distant points. Focal forces are related to head injuries such as skull fractures and can cause stress waves that cause fractures at a distance from the impact zone where the skull has reduces structural properties. The primary cause of concussive injuries is large acceleration of the brain due to inertial forces. Due to how the head moves, the head undergoes both linear and rotational acceleration during impact. It has been found that linear accelerations correspond to increased pressure within the brain. This increased pressures causes neurologic dysfunction. The rotational acceleration component of impact is caused by rapid head rotations. These accelerations create shear forces in the brain . Further studies have shown that brain tissue deforms more severely in response to shear forces (Arash). Shear deformation caused by rotational acceleration is widely accepted as the primary mechanism in concussive injury.

Common causes include sports injuries, bicycle accidents, car accidents, and falls, the latter two being the most frequent causes among adults.[3] In addition to a blow to the head, concussion may be caused by acceleration forces without a direct impact, and on the battlefield, MTBI is a potential consequence of nearby explosions.[4] It is not clear exactly what damage is done and how the symptoms are caused, but stretching of axons and changes in ion

A concussion is a mild form of traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by a sudden or violent blow, bump, or jolt to the head. Concussions can also occur from a fall or a blow to the body that causes the head to move rapidly back and forth. These types of sudden or violent impacts make the brain accelerate inside of the skull, in movements called coups and contrecoups. These movements lead to the brain striking the front and back of the skull, damaging the delicate and vital organ. The Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of medical works from ancient Greece, is the first written work to mention concussions, and it discusses loss of functions such as speech, hearing and sight that can result from "commotion of the brain"2. The idea of a disruption of mental functions by a "shaking of the brain" remained the accepted understanding of concussions until the 19th century. The Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi was the first person to use the term "cerebral concussion" in the 10th century A.D., and his definition of concussions as a transient loss of function with no physical damage, paved the way for the medical understanding of the condition for centuries. Since then we have come a long way in our understanding of concussions, and since concussions are common injuries, a lot is known about how they occur, and what their effects are upon the human body. According to the CDC, 1.6 million to 3.8 million concussions occur each year in the United States and 5-10% of

A traumatic brain injury (“TBI”) occurs when the brain is somehow injured, rattled, or wounded from an external source of force. The means of acquisition and the severity of TBIs are unique to each patient; therefore, symptoms and rehabilitation can vary greatly depending on the patient’s condition following the incident and how they sustained the injury. The severity of a TBI is generally classified into one of three categories: mild, moderate, or severe, and this type of diagnostic criteria influences how a patient with TBI is treated by medical staff and rehabilitation specialists. TBIs can affect a specific part of the brain that was directly impacted, leaving the patients with only one or a few areas of impairment, or the damage can

“I have never seen anything like this in my life,” said Istar Mohamed, a mother of three who was penetrated with shrapnel in her arm hip and leg.” “You can’t imagine the devastation that happened there. After a few moments I fell unconscious from the impact of it all.”

Although these models were reported to produce graded severities of brain injury with similar morphology to the clinical condition, they present their own limitation. The severity of injury induced by an acceleration injury (weight drop) is often highly variable. Mild CCI cause focal contusion and subrachnoid hemorrhage are not commensurate with the typical concussion in humans. CCI and FPI require craniotomy/ craniectomy which are not clinically relevant. While blast injury is more controversial model with little standardization in blast modeling with regard to the duration of exposure and measurement of peak overpressure. An updated concussive animal model is necessary to replicate the important features of the injury in patients with mTBI as closely as

Soldiers returning from combat face a wide range of challenges in adjusting to civilian life. These challenges are compounded by the high susceptibility of combat-experienced soldiers to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and overlapping symptoms of traumatic brain syndrome. As the two articles considered hereafter demonstrate, the U.S. military has sought better ways of understanding the primary symptoms and health consequences of traumatic brain syndrome with an interest in driving better outreach and treatment. The discussion will address the value of both articles in contributing to this aim.

Is military neurotrauma, then, simply an exotic form of concussion? Every war that included a physically fought battle had some form of blast force trauma taking place. Alexander (2015) continued his research and discovered: Keen interest in blast effects began in World War I, when the signature mechanism of injury was, as in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, blast force, mostly in the form of exploding artillery shells. The term

The most interesting thing I found out was that the majority of the injuries were not incurred from the bomb exploding, but from the fallout after. Yes, radiation supplied much of the injury base, but the immediate and most deadly of conditions were the mechanical injuries incurred from flying and falling debris, collapsing buildings, and other indirect blast effects (Manhattan Engineer District, 1946). It seems that most deaths were a cause of minor injuries that went untreated as well as those that death caused by individuals that might have been pinned in or under the wreckage. Those individuals succumbed to death by the fires that followed the explosion.

In the military, Traumatic Brain Injuries are most likely caused by the improvised explosives device or (IED). The issue about head injuries is that people who have it done realize how serious the injury is. “BAE system developed the Headbourne Energy Analysis and Diagnostic System or (HEADS) helmet back in 2008.” The quote explains how they develop a device to detect brain injuries because has been an issue that soldiers have been facing for a very long time. The sensor which is the now changed to Generation II HEADS due to the remodeling in April 2011, located inside the soldier's helmet to indicate the when it receives a massive force enough to cause a traumatic brain disorder. With the HEADS smart sensors it can help medical professionals perform their task in providing the valuable diagnostic tool to that utilizes radio frequency technology. The sensors is lightweight, small and can be secured inside the combats helmet. It is designed that way to frequently collect critical information or data, potentially