News From the Cause
Study of troops with traumatic brain injury hints at specific sites of damage (Washington Post)
June 02, 2011
About a third of American troops who have suffered brain injury from bomb blasts show immediate evidence of stretched and damaged nerve fibers at both the front and the back of the brain, according to a new study.
Whether that observation will prove useful in identifying people at higher risk for depression, post-traumatic stress and thinking problems after a blast injury is not known.
Nevertheless, experts say the findings, reported Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, shed some light on the unusually murky subject of traumatic brain injury (TBI).
“This is not a pregnancy test for TBI,” said Alicia Crowder, a neuroscientist at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, who was not involved in the research. “This is a foundation block on which to build a body of knowledge. It is a piece of a puzzle.”
TBI is common among troops in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, where most wounds are caused by explosions, not bullets. Estimates of its prevalence vary widely. The Defense Department is uncertain how many troops have received TBI diagnoses either in the war zone or within a month of leaving it, but it believes the number is less than 50,000. A group of civilian researchers, however, says there may be as many as 320,000 sufferers.
Part of the reason for the uncertainty is TBI’s wide range of symptoms and their overlap with psychiatric disorders. Researchers are urgently searching for ways to more accurately diagnose TBI, predict its course and differentiate it from post-traumatic stress disorder, which often occurs simultaneously.
The new study involved a collaboration between researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and clinicians at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a huge military hospital in Germany where all evacuated combat casualties stop on their way back to the United States.Click here to view more
