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Brain Anatomy And Function
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Recommended: Brain Anatomy And Function
Injury Stats
Roughly 1.4 million people sustain a traumatic brain injury every year in the United States.1 Of these 1.4 million, 235,000 injuries are severe enough to require hospitalization—and 50,000 result in death. More than half (over 700,000) of all of these yearly brain injuries are from sports-related activities, falls, and physical assaults. In the year 2000, traumatic brain injury cost an estimated $60 billion in the United States, totaled in both direct medical fees and indirect costs such as lost productivity.
Functions
The brain is your body’s central processor, responsible for the critical functions that keep you alive: such as controlling your heart rate, breathing, and immune system. The brain also gets incoming information about your surrounding environment through the senses: touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, and your sense of balance. Your brain processes this “sensory” information and sends signals to your muscles that make your body move in response to what was sensed. For example, if something moves close to one of your eyes, the brain sends a signal to the muscles controlling your eyelids—causing them to close and protect your eye.
Your brain is housed within the skull—bony protection from direct impact damage. However, the soft brain tissue essentially floats in a thin layer of liquid within the skull, and is close to the skull’s hard inside surface. Because of this, it is possible to damage the brain indirectly.
Injuries
Brain injuries can happen even without a visible injury to the head itself. There are 3 common types of brain injury, defined by the amount of visible damage to the brain. These range from invisible concussions, to bruising contusions, up to widespread tissue damage (diffuse axon...
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... and other brain disorders that become more common with age.
Due to the life sustaining functions performed by the brain, death is always a possible result of any brain injury, which can occur within days, weeks, or even months after the initial damaging event.
Injury Mechanisms
Traumatic brain injuries happen with either very rapid moving or stopping of your head. This can occur when the head strikes a stationary object or is struck with a blunt object—it can even happen by simply falling down! Any of these actions can cause the brain to collide with the inside of the skull.
When your brain strikes the skull, stresses are created in the brain tissue and nearby blood vessels. The brain-related injuries discussed above can occur when these stresses are high enough. As your brain moves inside your skull it can tear blood vessels, causing intracranial hemorrhaging.
Brain damage and death can result from serial concussions (Schafer). When one suffers from a concussion, one’s brain needs time to recover physically and mentally. Between 2002 and 2006, statistics showed that 52,000 people died from concussions and about 275,000 were hospitalized (Fundukian). Everyone’s recovery process is different (“Injury and Pain Care”). Although concussions may seem minor, they are very serious brain injuries that may result in severe damage to one’s brain.
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease attributed to single, sporadic, or repetitive brain trauma, including concussions and subconcussive hits (Baugh et al., 2012; Wortzel et al., 2013). This disease was originally referred to as dementia pugilistica, and nicknamed “punch drunk,” because individuals suffering from this disorder would present symptoms that were similar to someone’s mannerisms while being intoxicated (Wortzel et al., 2013). This “drunken” behavior is thought to be attributed to the cognitive, mood, and behavioral alterations as a result of the repetitive hits to the brain over an extended period of time. Because individuals suffering from this disease are often exposed to conditions that allow them to sustain blows to the head multiple times, the populations most often examined in these studies are athletes (football, boxing, rugby) and/or individuals in the military (McKee et al., 2009). Individuals can be symptom free for several years (Baugh et al., 2012). The onset of symptoms are sometimes seen about eight to ten years after an individual retires from their sport, which roughly equates to someone aged thirty to fifty yeas old (Baugh et al., 2012; Wortzel et al., 2013; Karantzoulis and Randolph, 2013). As with all diseases, symptoms can range from mild to severe. Researchers have found a positive correlation between the number of brain injuries sustained during a length of time playing a sport and the severity of symptoms (McKee et al., 2009).
A serious brain injury could lead to bleeding in or around your brain, causing symptoms that may develop right away or later.
An unnoticed fatal injury that countless athletes have experienced is a concussion. Many people have heard about concussions, but not about the underlying damage they cause the brain. A concussion is a minor traumatic brain injury that may occur when the head hits an object, or a moving object strikes the head. It can affect how the brain works for a whi...
...ng occurs it can damage the brain very quickly. The reason why the brain is so sensitive is because when the brain bleeds the blood irritates the brain tissues, and causes the brain to swell.
Concussions are an injury that falls under the Traumatic Brain Injury category. A concussion occurs when a force causes the brain to rock back and forth inside the skull, and hit the interior walls of the skull. When this happens it can result in bruising on two parts of the brain, the Coup and the Countercoup. This may result in Loss of consciousness, confusion, headaches, nausea or vomiting, blurred vision, and loss of short-term memory. I know from experience the nausea and blurred vision. I noticed that during what I thought was a concussion though after the initial hits my ears would ring and give me very painful headaches.
Traumatic brain injury or TBI occurs when a child has a head injury that causes damage to the brain. These injuries can be caused from being hit in the head or violently shaken. The results of TBI can change how a person’s brain develops, how they act, move, and think. It can also affect how they learn in school (NICHCY, 2012). TBI can affect the way a child thinks, retains information, attention span, behavior, speech, physical activities (which includes walking), and the way a child learns.
The brain has many different parts to it which help one function through daily life; parts such as the cerebrum which controls voluntary movement and regulates functions such as thinking, speaking and the ability to recall information. The cerebellum controls the balance and coordination and finally the brain stem, which consists of the medulla oblongata and the spinal cord which controls all involuntary functions such as breathing, heart rate and blood pressure. The brain stem is also able to carry out these actions even when someone is asleep. To fully understand how crucial the brain is to survival one must understand the functions of the brain stem.
Following behind motor vehicle crashes, traumatic brain injury in sports is the second leading cause of traumatic brain injuries for people fifth-teen to twenty-four years of age. Immense concerns follows given that American football accounts for the highest incidence of concussions (Rowson and Duma 2130). In addition, th...
Over 1.7 million traumatic brain injuries are reported each year. According to reports the leading cause of brain injuries are from falls followed by motor vehicle accidents, and accidents that were a result of being struck by something. Falls account for 32.5% of traumatic brain injuries in the United States. 50% of all child brain injuries are from falling. 61 % of all traumatic brain injuries among adults are 65 years old or older. Traumatic brain injuries are very violent blows or jolts to the head or body that result in the penetration of the skull. Mild traumatic brain injuries can cause brief dysfunction of the brain cells. Serious brain injuries can cause bleeding, bruising, physical damage to other parts of the body and torn tissues. Brain injuries are more prevalent with males rather than females. Causes of brain injuries include:
The brain is the control center of the human body. It sends and receives millions of signals every second, day and night, in the form of hormones, nerve impulses, and chemical messengers. This exchange of information makes us move, eat, sleep, and think.
Centers for Disease Control Injury Center May 30, 2007 Traumatic Brain Injury in the United States: Emergency Department Visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/pub-res/tbi_in_us_04/tbi_ed.htm
If something happens to interrupt the flow of blood, brain cells start to die within minutes because they can’t get oxygen. This is called a stroke. Sudden bleeding in the brain also can cause a stroke if it damages brain cells. A stroke can cause lasting brain damage, long-term disability, or even death.
First, we observe that in order for a concussion to occur, a rapid change in the motion of the skull must also occur within a short amount of time. This results in the brain (which tends to remain in a constant state of motion) colliding with the inside of the skull as the skull begins to change its state of motion. This causes compressional force on the cerebrum resulting in brain injury.
Since the brain and the nervous systems are in need of each other to perform their functions it is important to look at the brain and all of it 's features. The brain is the control center that process the majority of all the bodies functions. The spinal cord is responsible for certain simple muscle reflexes but the brain process both conscious and unconscious.