Tuesday, March 13, 2012

New Developments and Hope Around Brain Injury

The brain is truly an amazing organ and it is responsible for controlling virtually every part of our bodies while at the same processing information and enabling us to respond and experience the world around us. It is a very complex organ. But it is also an extremely sensitive organ that is protected only by our skull. Brain injury can have tremendous and devastating impacts on the way we live our life and function everyday. However recent advances in medical science offer hope to some victims of serious injury. Let’s discuss this further.

As indicated earlier the brain is very susceptible to injury and is very fragile. It is protected from most types of injury because it is surrounded and protected with a hard bony structure called the skull. In addition the brain floats within the skull and is protected from normal movement.

However if the brain suffers a more serious injury, there can be many consequences. A common type of serious injury can occur with a car accident for example. In that case the skull can be impacted or suffer a large blunt force. Other type of accidents is when practicing violent sports where you are not well protected.

The skull can be impacted and even broken. Or in the case of a bullet wound, an object can actually pierce through the skull and enter the brain which can obviously have much more serious conditions (even if a simple accident can be a dramatic event for your brain). But even if the skull is not pierced, serious injury can occur with a blunt force trauma.

In this case the brain can suffer a large force which causes it to impact the inside of the skull. At the point of impact the brain suffers an injury and swells. Since the volume within the skull is fixed, pressure builds on the brain and can cause either further injury.

If the brain becomes damages, it can result in death to certain areas of the brain due to clotted blood vessels which disrupts the supply of blood to critical area. There are also many other kinds of damage which can occur.

The damage to certain areas of the brain can result in many problems. It can result in paralysis of movement or speech. Or there can be significant long term impacts in one’s ability to perform certain mental functions easily like critical thought, language or visual processing.

However recent medical developments offer hope to some victims. There have been a variety of surgical techniques which can help to correct some of the damage suffered from injuries. In addition a number of treatments have been used to help to train other undamaged areas of the brain to take over certain functions that were previously controlled by the damaged sections.

At the same time many of these techniques can take time and a great deal of effort. But there have been some impressive results and scientists and researchers are working very hard to improve the techniques used to help people who are suffering from the effects of brain injury. There are also brain games that you can use to train your cognitive abilities which might have been impacted by the injury. In any case, it is important to try to maintain a healthy lifestyle to try to recover from that injury.

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