Radio Shows | Blast Brain Injury | mp3 … wma … wav

Imagine driving to the store and all of a sudden you can't remember where you're going. In fact you're so disoriented you have to call someone to tell you how to get home. Sounds unbelievable yet it happens quite often to people with a traumatic brain injury.

Headaches, the inability to focus thoughts, becoming lost in familiar places and having trouble remembering things are just a few symptoms of traumatic brain injury. Unfortunately an increasing number of our soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are victims.

Their injury is obvious if there's an open head wound but what about an injury you can't see? We're talking about a blast injury which can be caused by improvised explosive devices which we're hearing about all too often. While the symptoms may be similar to head trauma from a car accident, the damage is different.

Motor vehicle accidents usually involve acceleration/deceleration motions. This means while a person's head has stopped moving, the brain is still in motion and slams into the inside of the skull, causing contusions.

By comparison, the force from a blast sends waves of pressure through a person's body.

The injury occurs when that energy is transmitted by the air or fluid surrounding certain organs in our body. They can include the ear, GI tract, spinal cord and of course the brain. Unlike a tumor or brain hemorrhage, a blast injury is often undetectable with imaging equipment because the injury occurs at the microscopic level.

The death of brain cells associated with learning or memory can happen months after the blast. In fact, blast injuries are sometimes called "silent injuries," because they go unnoticed.

Treatment for blast injury is still in its infancy. That's why we need more research to understand it and design appropriate diagnostics and therapies to manage this "silent disease".

Left to Right: Yuan Li, Jeremy Cowart, YaPing Zeng, Kristen Kahrig, Evan Corning, Debbie Boone, Douglas S. DeWitt, Ph.D., Helen L. Hellmich, Ph.D., Stacy L. Sell, Ph.D., Bridget E. Hawkins, Joanne C. Cousins, Ph.D. Not pictured: Donald S. Prough, M.D., Donald J. Deyo, D.V.M., Maggie A. Parsley and Sheri Salsbury

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