Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

A concussion or mild traumatic brain injury(mTBI) is an acceleration/deceleration injury resulting from biomechanical forces transmitted to the cerebral tissues from impacts to the head (Broglio). Concussive sport injuries make up the majority of all brain injuries in the United States with 1.6 to 3.8 million cases every year. Every year athletes get bigger, better, faster, and stronger leading to higher collision forces and an increase in concussive injuries. The symptoms of concussions often appear quickly and resolve randomly making it difficult to be identified and diagnosed. Common symptoms of mTBI include

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).

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.

When it comes to sports, they can be a great way to stay in good health and to make a living. However, in today’s day and time, when it comes to playing sports the more vigorous and completive they become we see the risk of injuries increase. One of the more common injuries that occur in today’s sports is a concussion. A concussion is a very common injury, practically in the sport of football, both at the collegiate and national level. When it comes to causing catastrophic trauma to the brain multiple times, it could potentially cause the athlete to die. MTBI’s known as mild traumatic brain injuries are a touch topic to both talk and research about because they are often overlooked because the majority of the findings have failed to provide

Traumatic brain injuries have become an epidemic, affecting both children and adults. The effects of these brain injuries are severe however; they do differ in severity from youth to adult age in areas such as: cognitive and speech function, physical ability, fatigue, and headaches. America has been recognizing the severity of these injuries and sports and medicine have increased funding to prevent them. In order to properly decide what treatment is best for adults or youth suffering traumatic brain injuries one must conclude the differences between adult and youth symptoms, this proves challenging because the amount of adults suffering traumatic brain injuries is much fewer than adolescents. Another challenge faced when attempting to record and prevent these injuries is the lack of knowledge of symptoms; youth often misinterpret concussion symptoms and believe they have learning disabilities such as ADD and ADHD.

Post-Concussion Syndrome (PCS) is considered a neurological disorder, which produce long-term concussive effects. PCS is a form of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and can be the result of one or multiple concussions (McKee et al. 2009). A concussion is characterized as a mild TBI (mTBI) (Stern et al. 2013). The term “mild” refers to the severity of the original physical trauma, and does not indicate the severity of symptoms following the injury. The American Academy of Neurology (1997) defines concussion as any alteration of mental status due to a biomechanical force affecting the brain with or without loss of consciousness. If concussive symptoms persist longer than 3 months, a patient is diagnosed with PCS (Gavett et al. 2011a;

One of the principal problems for defining and diagnosing concussion, is that there is not a universally acceptable definition for concussion. In the article, the author refers to concussion as a “mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) that results in a temporary loss of neurologic function without apparent structural damage, and may or may not involve loss of consciousness (LOC)” (Mennella, 2016). Concussions are considered a great concern in healthcare because according to the Center for Diseases Control (CDC) it is estimated that there are 1.6 to 3.8 million sports-related concussions in the United States every year (CDC, 2017). And according to the article there is also around of 52,000 deaths every year (Mennella, 2016). Although it is estimated that the number of cases could be higher because researchers found that the lack of well-defined and accepted definition of concussion, can cause that many times concussion could be misdiagnosed. For this reason, it is extremely important that organizations work in finding a broadly accepted definition of concussion, in order to have a better and accurate estimate of the number of cases.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a type of brain injury in which a sudden trauma leads to damage to the brain. This brain injury could be due to the head suddenly and aggressively being hit against an object or when an object penetrates the skull and enters the tissue of the brain. The symptoms of TBI can be classified as mild, moderate, or severe, but this all depends on the amount of damage that was done to the brain. When enduring a mild TBI, the person may experience a loss of consciousness, confusion, dizziness, and many other symptoms that are caused by brain damage. A person enduring a moderate TBI may encounter these same symptoms as well as severe ones.

Right now, they diagnose concussions based on the symptoms of one. For example, they might have blurred vision, feel groggy, a headache, a balancing problem or vomiting. Nevertheless, the problem is that it does not allow for doctors to diagnose the severity of a brain injury accurately. Giving a child a computed tomography scan can offer a better look at

Current diagnosis of mild TBI is based on subjectively reported symptoms. There are no scans or blood tests to objectively assess the extent of the injury. There are guidelines, scales, and various checklist that are not specific enough for treatment or intervention. Standard brain imaging techniques, such as computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) do not contribute much to the diagnosis of mild TBI (except for ruling out intracranial bleeding or skull fracture), because the brain structure in those tests shows as normal in mild injuries. There are some advanced imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), positron emission tomography with computerized tomography (PET CT), single-photon emission computed tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and diffusion tensor imaging that can be helpful. Those tests, unfortunately, are not regularly administered and not covered by the health plans since they are considered not 100% accurate and have high cost. Electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potential procedures can measure the brain waves and detect the differences of injured versus non-injured brain; however, they are not routinely used in mild cases.

Computed tomography is used in the emergency setting, but it is not useful in predicting short- or long-term outcomes in sports related concussion. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is more sensitive than CT, but the correlation between focal structural lesions detected by conventional MRI is controversial since T1- or T2-weighted MRI images may not be sensitive to the neuropathology of milder injuries There has been increasing interest in diagnosing and prognosticating after concussions using susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

A tramatic brain injury or TBI is a injury that occurs when a unexpected impact causes the brain to hit the inside of the skull in a accelerated motion. There are different types of tramatic brain injuries mild, moderate and severe. Mild tramatic brain injury or mTBI is the most common brain injury. It is said that about 1.7 billion TBI’s occur in the united states each year. And of that number roughly 80% of those are mild TBI’s. (hyatt) TBI may be associated with a diminished or altered state of consciousness at the time of injury and often leads to cognitive, neurologic, or psychological impairment. It is classified by level of severity as mild, moderate, or severe. Glasgow Coma Scale score in the first 24 hours after injury, and whether

Neuroimaging scans play a cardinal role in TBI diagnosis, prognosis, and deciding what treatments to give. CT is the preferred method of assessment on admission to determine structural damage and to detect (developing) intracranial hematomas (Maas, Stocchetti, Bullock, 2008). The preferred test is the computed tomography (CT) scan due to its speed, accuracy, and accessibility. The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) exhibits more details than CT scan. MRI scan can be more advantageous than the CT scan as it is able to detect other TBI symptoms such as diffuse axonal injury (DAI). Conversely, MRI is usually not the preferred method in emergency setting due to its inability to detect brain hemorrhage and fractures, general inaccessibility, and lengthiness of the procedure.