Traumatic Brain Injury

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.