Articles Posted in Traumatic Brain Injuries

March is National Brain Injury Awareness Month, an appropriate moment to remind ourselves of the dangers that can accompany many otherwise fun and healthy activities. CBS Sports touches on this with the harrowing story of a teenager who sustained a concussion playing middle school football. Because the injury was not properly evaluated on the field Zachary Lystedt, then 13, returned to the game, with devastating consequences.

According to CBS, the teenaged Tahoma, Washington linebacker “writhed on the ground” after an initial hit near the end of the first half of a 2006 game. He returned to the field after halftime, but as the game ended collapsed in pain, his eyesight gone because swelling in his brain was cutting off an optic nerve. The teenager was rushed to the hospital where he spent a month in a coma, and another 20 months on a feeding tube. Today, “he has very little feeling and movement on his right side and remains dependent on a wheelchair,” according to CBS.

As he recovered Lystedt became an advocate for stronger rules governing student athletes and potential traumatic brain injuries. Last year Washington’s legislature passed a law, named in his honor, establishing “the most stringent return-to-play protocols of any state in the country,” according to CBS. Among other things, the law bars student-athletes who suffer a suspected concussion from returning to the playing field until they have been examined and cleared by a licensed medical professional. Lystedt now spearheads an effort to get similar legislation adopted in all 50 states, and possibly at the federal level.

The men’s hockey tournament at the Vancouver Winter Olympics got underway last night. As a recent article in the New York Times details, though many of the players appearing in the Olympics come from the NHL, hockey played under international rules – including all games in the Olympics – differs in several significant ways from the game Americans are accustomed to seeing. Many of the rule changes are designed to minimize traumatic brain injuries.

As the newspaper writes: “The biggest difference is on checks to the head. While the N.H.L. continues to debate whether some hits to the head should be penalized, the I.I.H.F. (hockey’s international governing body) has outlawed them.”

Another obvious difference: international hockey – like college hockey here in the States – shows no tolerance for on-ice fighting. More subtle differences include rules requiring visors and the use of chin straps on players’ helmets, and mandating that a player whose helmet comes off leave the ice immediately.

The venerable CBS Sunday morning show Face the Nation took a break from politics today to talk, with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell as the program’s main guest. Among the topics on the agenda: traumatic brain injuries, a subject that has been much in the news here in Oregon with the recent enactment of laws aimed at lessening the number of Oregon traumatic brain injuries sustained through youth sports, including football.

This is an issue I have written about before (see this post from last November), and one which has caused the NFL a certain amount of public relations trouble in recent months. On CBS, Goodell rejected any suggestion that the NFL has been, as host Bob Schieffer put it, “late to recognize” the seriousness of concussions and brain injuries as a problem at the professional level. The commissioner said the league has been on top of the issue “since the mid-90s”; adding: “Medical science is still trying to determine what are the long-term effects of concussions. How do you treat these?”

This is a position with which some might take issue. As I noted in November, the league is working to counter accusations it ignored or downplayed the seriousness of concussions in football for years. When Schieffer pointed out that the NFL’s own studies show that football players are five times more likely than members of the general population to suffer brain injuries or memory loss and that among 30-49 year olds that figure rises to 19 times the average, Goodell was quick to dismiss the very NFL studies he had been touting as examples of League responsibility a few minutes earlier. “This wasn’t a medical survey,” he said.

A recent New York Times article highlights an area where Oregon and other Pacific Northwest states are leading the nation: laws and policies recognizing the growing seriousness of concussions and other brain injuries in sports.

As the paper notes, “last year Washington and Oregon passed the first concussion-specific laws covering scholastic sports.” As I have previously noted (see this blog entry from November), traumatic brain injuries are increasingly being acknowledged as a problem, particularly in professional football. The Times notes that Florida Governor Charlie Crist is trying to use the fact that the Super Bowl is being played in his state this week to spur his own legislature on to passing brain injuries legislation. The Oregon brain injury laws, however, are among the first in the nation to acknowledge the extent to which this problem also exists in college, high school and even youth sports. The Times notes that traumatic brain injury laws focusing on student-athletes are currently being considered by legislatures in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, as well as Florida.

The Winter Olympics, due to begin February 12 in Vancouver, Canada, may also bring some of these issues into focus. As a recent Los Angeles Times article recounts, several top American snowboarders have recently been seriously injured, including Kevin Pearce, widely considered a possible gold medalist in half-pipe but hospitalized in Utah since December with a severe brain injury sustained during training.

The New York Times reports today that the two doctors leading the NFL’s study of concussions and other head injuries have quit following charges that they do not take evidence of mounting long-term brain injuries among professional football players sufficiently seriously. It is a development with resonance for those battling Oregon traumatic brain injuries.

As the paper notes, one of the doctors, Ira Casson, has been a member of the league’s committee on brain injuries since 1994 and has co-chaired the committee since 2007. According to the paper, “Casson has been the league’s primary voice discrediting all evidence linking football players with subsequent dementia.” He has recently been criticized both by the families of former NFL players and by members of Congress.

At issue, and of interest to those of us outside the world of professional football, is whether the accumulation of repeated, more minor, head injuries can add up to a traumatic brain injury over time. One need not take the sort of punishment football players endure every week to be in a situation where the sum of many concussions is greater than the damage done by the individual parts.

Natasha Richardson, who died this month from a traumatic brain injury, was just 45-years-old. The movie star was young, talented, had a loving husband and two young boys, and no one expected her to die so suddenly and unexpectedly—after a fall on a beginner’s ski slope.

Richardson struck her head, and although there are reports that she initially turned down an offer for medical attention—it wouldn’t be until a second ambulance arrived at the ski resort that she was finally whisked away—one can’t help but wonder how her life’s story would have turned out if she or someone else had known enough to insist that she receive medical care immediately.

Autopsy reports indicate that the movie star died because of a blunt impact to the head that resulted in an epidural hematoma. This kind traumatic brain injury can cause the brain to swell and bleeding to occur. It can also take awhile for symptoms of this TBI to appear, and if too much time passes, this injury can prove fatal.

Common causes of an epidural hematoma include fall accidents, assault incidents, motor vehicle crashes, motorcycle accidents, and slip accidents. Of course, there are other kinds of traumatic brain injuries that can also occur from these kinds of accidents.

The sooner someone with a TBI or another kind of head injury gets medical attention—even if the injury appears mild or minor—the faster any potentially serious condition can be diagnosed and the more time there will be to prevent the injury from becoming catastrophic or fatal.

A person who survives an accident with a serious brain injury could end up permanently impaired and debilitated and, depending on the seriousness of the TBI, require ongoing, costly medical care. The financial and emotional toll on the TBI patient and his or her family can be tragically life changing, which is why, if someone you love sustained a traumatic brain injury in an Oregon accident that occurred because another party was negligent, you should speak to a Portland personal injury lawyer as soon as possible.

Richardson died during Brain Injury Awareness month.

911 Calls Show Urgency Of Richardson Fall, CBS News, March 31, 2009
Actress Natasha Richardson buried in Upstate New York, Chicago Tribune, March 23, 2009
Related Web Resources:
Brain Injury Awareness Month 2009

Brain Injury Association of America

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