Traumatic Brain Injuries Of Some Veterans

Traumatic Brain Injuries Of Some Veterans.
The brains of some veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who were injured by homemade bombs show an unique model of damage, a small muse about finds. Researchers speculate that the damage - what they call a "honeycomb" pattern of broken and proud nerve fibers - might help explain the phenomenon of "shell shock". That name was coined during World War I, when trench warfare exposed troops to constant bombardment with exploding shells example. Many soldiers developed an array of symptoms, from problems with eyesight and hearing, to headaches and tremors, to confusion, desire and nightmares.

Now referred to as blast neurotrauma, the injuries have become an signal issue again, said Dr Vassilis Koliatsos, the senior researcher on the new study read more here. "Vets coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan have been exposed to a range of situations, including blasts from improvised touchy devices IEDs ," said Koliatsos, a professor of pathology, neurology and psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

But even though the acknowledgement of shell shock goes back 100 years, researchers still be versed little about what is actually going on in the brain. For the new study, published recently in the paper Acta Neuropathologica Communications, his team studied autopsied brain tissue from five US feud veterans. The soldiers had all survived IED bomb blasts, but later died of other causes. The researchers compared the vets' mastermind tissue to autopsies of 24 settle who had died of various causes, including traffic accidents and drug overdoses.

The soldiers' brains showed a dissimilar pattern of damage to nerve fibers in key regions of the brain - including the frontal lobes, which hold the whip hand memory, reasoning and decision-making. He said the "honeycomb" motif of small lesions was unlike the damage seen in people who died from head trauma in a car accident, or those who suffered "punch-drunk syndrome" - planner degeneration caused by repeated concussions.

Even Easy Brain Concussion Can Lead To Serious Consequences

Even Easy Brain Concussion Can Lead To Serious Consequences.
Soldiers who be reduced passive brain injuries from blasts have long-term changes in their brains, a inadequate new study suggests. Diagnosing mild brain injuries caused by explosions can be challenging using pedestal CT or MRI scans, the researchers said. For their study, they turned to a notable type of MRI called diffusion tensor imaging. The technology was used to assess the brains of 10 American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who had been diagnosed with forgiving traumatizing brain injuries and a comparison group of 10 people without brain injuries.

The average space since the veterans had suffered their brain injuries was a little more than four years. The researchers found that the veterans and the likeness group had significant differences in the brain's white matter, which consists mostly of signal-carrying nerve fibers. These differences were linked with notice problems, delayed memory and poorer psychomotor assess scores among the veterans. "Psychomotor" refers to movement and muscle ability associated with bonkers processes.

Study Of Helmets With Face Shields

Study Of Helmets With Face Shields.
Adding right side shields to soldiers' helmets could wind down brain damage resulting from explosions, which account for more than half of all combat-related injuries unchanging by US troops, a new study suggests. Using computer models to simulate battlefield blasts and their gear on brain tissue, researchers learned that the face is the brute pathway through which an explosion's pressure waves reach the brain. According to the US Department of Defense, about 130000 US maintenance members deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq have sustained blast-induced damaging brain injury (TBI) from explosions.

The addition of a face shield made with transparent armor resources to the advanced combat helmets (ACH) worn by most troops significantly impeded direct denounce waves to the face, mitigating brain injury, said lead researcher Raul Radovitzky, an subsidiary professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "We tried to assess the physics of the problem, but also the biological and clinical responses, and sleeper it all together," said Radovitzky, who is also associate impresario of MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. "The key thing from our point of view is that we commonplace the problem in the news and thought maybe we could make a contribution".

Researching the issue, Radovitzky created computer models by collaborating with David Moore, a neurologist at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC Moore cast-off MRI scans to simulate features of the brain, and the two scientists compared how the intellectual would rejoin to a frontal detonation wave in three scenarios: a head with no helmet, a head wearing the ACH, and a culmination wearing the ACH plus a face shield. The sophisticated computer models were able to coalesce the force of blast waves with skull features such as the sinuses, cerebrospinal fluid, and the layers of gray and ghostly matter in the brain. Results revealed that without the face shield, the ACH slightly delayed the gale wave's arrival but did not significantly lessen its effect on brain tissue. Adding a face shield, however, considerably reduced forces on the brain.