Brain Injury review

In the recent paper by M trovato and colleagues from the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore (the United states of America), an ivestigation was carried out to look into the efficacy of donepezil on the memory; this was carried out on three adolescents who were suffering from traumatic brain injury.

By testing single adolescent patients for factors such as total number of words recalled and the ability to continue to recall words after time, memory was tested in brain injury both receiving and not receiving medication. It was found that patients who were receiving medicine had a much improved memory function than those who were not receiving medicine, and that no side effects were observed. this suggests that the use of donepezil may be of great benefit to adolescent sufferes of traumatic brain injuries.

Full article available from
PMID: 16537276

Just read this article in the bbc news section, I’ve given an excerpt of it below, a link to the full story can be seen at the bottom of the page. It looks like a great through.

Nanotechnology has restored the sight of blind rodents, a new study shows.  

Scientists mimicked the effect of a traumatic brain injury by severing the optical nerve tract in hamsters, causing the animals to lose vision.

After injecting the hamsters with a solution containing nanoparticles, the nerves re-grew and sight returned.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team hopes this technique could be used in future reconstructive brain surgery.

I’ll be sure to read the full article in PNAS and give you a good overview of it, until then it can be found at the bbc site.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4801728.stm

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.