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On August 10, 2011, United States Navel Petty Officer KY, age 26, was stopped in traffic on Route 206 in Bordentown, New Jersey, when her vehicle was rear-ended by a Ford 350 pickup operated by Mr. Avisai Pantle-Aguirre and owned by H&H Landscape Management, LLC. The force of the crash spun KY’s vehicle, causing it to collide with the vehicle stopped in front of her.

KY was initially diagnosed with having sustained a concussion and a neck injury. MRI’s of her brain, neck and low back revealed two small lesions in her left parietal lobe, three herniated discs in her neck and a bulging disc in her low back. …
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BlueCross BlueShield just released its Health of America Report showing that concussion diagnoses have increased 43% from 2010-2015. The rise was particularly marked in children and teens with a 71% rise in diagnosed incidences. Not surprisingly the rate in male patients during the fall season was double that of females. “Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had…

In 2001, Teasdale and Engberg published an article in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, entitled Suicide after Traumatic Brain Injury: A Population Study. The researchers reviewed data from Danish hospital admissions covering the years 1979-93 and found that patients who had sustained a TBI had an increased risk of suicide. The authors…

The theory of neuroplasticity holds that the brain will change and adapt to different conditions including to childhood injuries. This theory is often challenged and sometimes referred to as a “myth.” However, a new study by Seena Fazel and colleagues from the Department of Psychiatry at University of Oxford in the United Kingdom delivered data that supports the claims of neuroplasticity theorists. Fazel’s conclusions reveal that the later a mild TBI is sustained, the worse the health and social outcome is for the patient. The study also found a causal effect between childhood Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) and the risk of brain impairment and social dysfunction at later stages in life.
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A new study published in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation calls into question whether acute cognitive and physical rest improves concussion recovery times. Thomas A. Buckley, EdD, ATC of the Department Kinesiology and Applied Physiology at the University of Delaware conducted a study to determine if rest after concussion would result in a shorter recovery time in a population of college-aged student-athletes.

This hypothesis was based on the 4th International Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport which recommends rest after injury as “a corner stone for acute concussion treatment” and outcomes. The authors noted that “rest” was achieved by discontinuing “school attendance, academic work, electronics usage and [any] exercise.” Prescribing rest was also believed to reduce the risk of repeated concussion and the “rare, but potentially fatal, second-impact syndrome.”

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A study by doctors at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine provides additional support that use of Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) may be clinically helpful to patients with mild Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) because it shows possible evidence of brain repair in post-injury patients. Scans conducted one year post-injury show that patients…

Brent Masel, M.D., the medical director of the Brain Injury Association-America published a paper which called traumatic brain injury a chronic disease. In that paper, Dr. Masel outlined a list of medical conditions associated with traumatic brain injury and encouraged that a TBI be looked at, “not as an event, not as the final outcome, but rather as the beginning of a disease process.”

More recently, Charles Wilkinson, Ph.D. and Elizabeth A. Colasurdo, researchers with the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle issued a press release stating: “Although studies and civilians indicate a 25%-50% prevalence of hormonal deficiencies resulted from brain injury, surprisingly there is limited data on the prevalence and symptoms in military veterans.”

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A new study from the University of Adelaide in Australia found that in the medium- to long-term pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI), the fractional anisotropy (FA) values for numerous large white matter tracks in comparison to the whole brain were related to cognition. This study, published online in Developmental Neuropsychology, specifically examined the relationship between diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) findings and cognition following pediatric traumatic brain injury.
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Francis X. Conidi, M.D. from the Florida Center for Headache and Sports Neurology has issued a new study which examined retired NFL players for signs of traumatic brain injuries using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), and the results were fairly damning. The study found that over 40% of the retired NFL players had sustained a traumatic brain injury. Approximately 40 retired NFL players underwent the exam, which included a Compressive Neurological/Headache history, neurological examination, neurophysiological evaluation, Clinical Dementia Rating Scale, physiological evaluation and DTI MRI were performed. According to Dr. Conidi, this represents “one of the largest studies to date in living retired NFL players.”
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