In the United States alone, there are approximately one million head injuries reported every year; eighty five percent of these injuries are classified as mild traumatic brain injuries. Traumatic brain injuries, also known as concussions, are the leading cause of death and disability for neurological disorders before the age of fifty. Mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) are one of the most prevalent, and have become a major public health issue. A few of the main reasons there are so many problems with traumatic brain injuries (TBI), are lack of reporting by the patients, physician’s misdiagnosis or undiagnosed, and lack of awareness.
There are three categories of TBI, severe, moderate, and mild. Mild injuries are far more difficult to diagnose as compared to severe and moderate. With
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These are just a few symptoms but the functional deficits are emotional, cognitive, behavioral and physical. Poor concentration is the most commonly reported functional limitation. Some of these deficits can be manifested in other unrelated disorders like learning disabilities and psychiatric disorders or others. Therefore, it is easy to understand why mTBI is frequently misdiagnosed.
There are countless mTBIs that are not only misdiagnosed but also unreported by the patients. One of the most problematic issues concerning treatment of mild traumatic brain injury is patient willingness to report. Many athletes tend to not report problems after a head injury for fear of not being able to play in a game or continue playing their sport. Men and women of the armed forces are also guilty of not reporting head trauma due to social norms. This lack of awareness of the risk involved can be very
Awareness about traumatic brain injury has increased because of combat operations in Irag and Afghanistan and in the National Football League. The debate over the nature of traumatic brain injury is an ongoing issue. Some think of categorizing from mild to the server is the condition of TBI that can lead to a person bring over diagnosed or misdiagnosed. The other side points out that the focus should not be on diagnosis put on the recovery and treatment of the symptoms.
Perhaps one of the least understood injuries is a Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), otherwise known as a concussion. Over 1,000,000 concussions occur the United States every year (Majerske et al., 2008), and can be caused by any blow to the head. It is likely that many concussions do not go diagnosed. 300,000 of these concussion have been contributed to sports related injury (Majerske et al., 2008), making the study of sports related concussions in athletes the most important and easiest subjects to study.
The term “concussion” across various areas of clinical and research contexts changes and is not well defined causing confusion in patients and healthcare providers. The term “concussion” is interchangeably used with the term mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), minor lose head injury, and mild closed head injury (Apps & Walter, 2012). Concussion is used in the sports medicine community to place an emphasis on impaired functional status following head trauma, and this concept will be further reviewed in this study.
Mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI), however, are simply another term used to describe a milder form of concussion. Similar to the conceptual definition of a concussion, the World Health Organization Collaborating Neurotrauma Task Force defines an mTBI as being “an acute brain injury resulting from mechanical energy to the head from external physical forces” (Crandall et. al., 2014, p. 1359).
Despite increasing awareness of sports related head injury, controversy and confusion persist, especially in regards to concussions. Prior to the introduction of CAT Scan technology, concussions were often misdiagnosed and overlooked. However, this technology has not yet met its full potential in terms of identifying and treating concussions in the early stages. This can likely be attributed to the stigma surrounding concussions, deeming it an injury that is not serious as the injury is internal or “hidden”. As a result, athletes are more reluctant to report head injuries. Sports related head impacts can cause changes in the brain even when there are no outward signs of a concussion. Untreated, this “hidden injury” can lead to changes in brain
Traumatic brain injury in general is characterized by the changes in brain function due to some sort of a biomechanical force induced by either directly or indirectly as a hit or blow to the head (Facts and Prevention, 2015). Mild traumatic brain injury, which will be considered as equivalent term with concussion, was defined by the International Conference on Concussion in Sport as a complex pathophysiological process induced by biomechanical forces (Mccrory et al., 2013). This penetrating head injury will disrupt the normal function of the brain. The cause of sports-related brain injury can be induced by a direct or indirect blow to the head. Injury can also be caused by the force of impulse due to impacts on other parts of the body being
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
Concussion or mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) represents the most common type of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Even though this type of TBI is called “mild”, the effect on the family and the injured person can be devastating. Concussions can be tricky to diagnose and there is no specific cure for concussion. There is growing recognition and some evidence that mild mechanical trauma resulting from sports injuries, military combat, and other physically engaging pursuits may have cumulative and chronic neurological consequences [3, 4]. However there is still a poor understanding of concussions and their effects. Studying mild brain injury in humans is challenging since it is restricted to cognitive assessment and brain imaging evaluation. Animal models provide a means to study concussions in a rigorous, controlled, and efficient manner with the hope of further diagnosis and treatment of mTBI.
Concussions, classified as a mild traumatic brain injury, are a growing problem in the United States. Research is being done to determine immediate, short-term, and long-term effects as well as the most effective way to treat concussions and the best way to prevent them. The general population is learning more about concussions as more information becomes available. This is especially important because the spread of knowledge of concussions is crucial in preventing and treating concussions. It is important that people
According to the Center for Disease Control, traumatic brain injuries contribute to about 30% of all injury deaths. Traumatic brain injuries are classified as “severe” or “mild”. The most common type of TBI is mild and called a concussion. The CDC estimates 2.8 billion emergency
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has affected many people, but has hardly raised awareness; in fact according to Marcia Clemmitt “About 1.7 million Americans suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI) every year…Yet, while they affect so many people, TBI has received little medical-research funding until brain injuries from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan … began to mount in recent years.”(Clemmitt) For such a long time many people were unaware of what traumatic brain injury even meant; Up until a numerous groups of veterans that came back home, from Afghanistan were found to suffer from traumatic brain injuries. Due to the discovery, the people that already suffered from traumatic brain injury
“From 2001 to 2009, the annual number of sports-related TBI emergency department visits in individuals age 19 and under climbed from 153,375 to 248,414, an increase of increase of 62 percent” (Lowrey and Morain 290). A Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) or Concussion in most cases is when there is a severe blow to the brain. Not all TBIs are the same and not all of them can be treated the same, but what they do have in common is that they changes lives negatively and should be address accordingly. Americans should give more attention to the issue of Traumatic Brain Injuries in sports because it takes more time than a regular injury for symptoms to reside, players usually do not come back the same, and could possibly lead other medical issues.
However it can be of limited use in mild traumatic brain injury diagnosis as the presence of multiple trauma, use of sedatives, physical stress and alcohol abuse (Practice Parameter: The management of concussion in sports (summary statement), 1997). Computed tomography (CT) scan and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are used to distinguish the degree of brain injury, yet in case of concussion CT and MRIs usually fail to declare injury lesions due to limited sensitivity. With the Improvement of technologies, MRIs have become more sensitive than CT but as their limited availability and great cost, the usage of this approach is hard to do for the acute stage of diagnosis and follow up (Bhomia et al.,
Traumatic brain injury (TBI), or intracranial injury, is a medical diagnosis which refers to closed or penetrative damage to the brain that is caused by an external source. Every year, TBIs affect approximately 150-250 people in a population of 100,000 (León-Carrión, Domínguez-Morales, Martín, & Murillo-Cabezas, 2005). The leading causes of TBI are traffic accidents, work injuries, sports injuries, and extreme violence (León-Carrión et al., 2005). TBI is most often fatal when the cause is an injury due to the use of firearms, a traffic accident, or a long fall (León-Carrión et al., 2005). However, fatality rates and rates of occurrence differ in various countries due to
Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of Americans risk brain injury every year, and many do not realize it. In addition, a lot of doctors do not know it either. Given the amount of attention that head injuries have received, this can still be somewhat surprising. They even created a movie titled, "Concussion," to bring awareness of head injury to the professional sports industry. That has served as a flash point to help bring public awareness to it so that we can do our best to address the problem.