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Head Injury |
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Head Injury |
Head Injury is the most common cause of brain damage in young people. Approximately 7500 suffer head injuries in Britain each year. It also affects older people, although brain damage can be caused by a number of factors that become increasingly common as you get older. For example, Dementia.
Most head injuries are mild, but there are still many people left with longlasting
problems.
The most common cause of head injuries are traffic accidents. Young men are the group of people who are at most risk of this, and alcohol is often involved, not just through drink driving, but also in getting run over.
When a person in a car is involved in a car crash, the head will usually hit something like the windscreen. Quite apart from the damage that can occur from hitting the head hard, the brain is often subjected to strong forces, and although the head itself might come to a complete stop when it hits the windscreen, the brain doesn't stop, it continues to 'bounce' around in the skull, often leading to injuries to the back of the brain when all the damage that can be seen may be at the front of the head. These are commonly called contre coup contusions.
Penetration injuries such as gunshot wounds are known as Open Head
Injuries. When the head has been hit hard, but the skull remains intact
these injuries are known as Closed Head Injuries.
Generally, this is decided by how long the person has been unconscious for and/or on the basis of something called Post Traumatic Amnesia (shortened to PTA here), which basically means that the person has memory problems after being injured and coming round.
Not all problems are immediately obvious following the injury.
Two common problems that can occur a while after the head injury has happened are:
Often one of the first tests that are done on a head injury patient are a brain scan. These have all sorts of different names (e.g. CT scan, PET scan, MRI scan, SPECT scan e.t.c), and have different advantages and disadvantages to them. There is not space to go into them all in detail here, but the important thing to remember is that using a scan alone is not normally enough to get a complete picture of the extent of brain damage.
To gain more information, patients are often asked to undergo a series of tests. These are usually conducted by a specialist. This can be a neurologist (specialist doctor) or a neuropsychologist (specialist psychologist).
These tests are known as psychometric tests, and can examine many
different aspects of the brains' performance. They don't require injections
or operations, and allow the specialist to pinpoint in greater detail,
what jobs the brain is not doing as well since the injury. For example,
they can test things like speech, co-ordination, memory, attention, and
even thinking.
Yes, people can and do recover from head injuries. However, it gets less and less likely the more severe the injury is. Also, the longer time goes on, the pace of recovery slows down.
In minor brain injury (see above), it is rare that a person has permament brain problems. However, they may suffer from what are known as post-concussional symptoms. These include headache (obviously! - Ed), dizziness, being sensitive to loud noises or bright lights, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), blurred or double vision, restlessness, sleeping problems (insomnia), slowed thinking, poor concentation, poor memory, tiredness, feeling irritable, feeling anxious, and feeling depressed.
These symptoms pass relatively quickly in the vast majority of cases, usually within a maximum of 3 months. However, there are some people who continue to suffer problems long after this period. The experts' aren't really sure why this is, but some of them reckon that there is some long lasting damage that doesn't always get found, and having to cope with not being able to do things as well as before leads people to become anxious or depressed, especially as they may well have been given a 'clean bill of health' by their doctor.
On the other hand, some experts think that continuing problems, are down to factors such as the persons' existing personality, drug/alcohol problems, or pre-existing psychiatric disorders.
It seems to us that both situations can exist.
In moderate or severe brain injury, the problems are likely to be much more severe and longlasting. The actual problems depend on what part of the brain has been damaged, as different parts of the brain are responsible for different things, e.g. a part for speech, a part for movement etc.
However some of the more common problems include problems with attention,
tiredness, learning new things, remembering, solving problems, and planning.
Peeoples' emotions are also affected, and often friends and family of
the head injured person described them as 'a completely different person'
to the one they knew before the injury. In fact, as some research has shown,
it is quite common for people to recover basic functions like walking within
a few years even after moderate or severe injury. However, the disruption
to the persons' thinking and behaviour often leads to massive problems
within their ability to hold down a job and maintain close relationships.
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