Brain Injury review

Traumatic brain injury is the leading cause of long term disability in children and adolescences, some of the major consequences associated with it include behavior and physical effects as well as more cognitive problems. One of the more common consequences is dizziness; this is reported in over eighty percent of patients suffering from traumatic brain injury in the initial days following the brain damage. There are many differences in research results that have investigated dizziness in brain injury sufferers.

There are many different types of dizziness associated with traumatic brain injury, these include but are not limited to light headedness, where the sufferer may feel like they are about to feint, this is often associated with a drop in blood pressure when postural is changed; Vertigo, related to the vestibular system;  psycho-physiological dizziness, this involves visual and space problems.
 

The best way of explaining dizziness is as damage to the sensory-motor interactions, which leads to a defect in motor function and in the function of the senses, so that the sufferer is unable to grasp relative orientation. Interestingly many people who suffer from traumatic brain injury have problems to describe their dizziness. There is therefore little information about the causes of non-vesticular dizziness following traumatic brain injury.
 

In an article in ‘brain injury’ Maskell and colleagues concluded that though the causes of the symptoms that lead to dizziness are well documented, there are great problems associated with the data known about the functional impact that dizziness causes in traumatic brain injury patients.