Blast-related injuries detected in the brains of U.S. military personnel
Washington University in St. Louis News
By Michael C. Purdy
June 1, 2011
An advanced imaging technique has revealed that some U.S. military personnel with mild blast-related traumatic brain injuries have abnormalities in the brain that have not been seen with other types of imaging.
The abnormalities were found in the brain’s white matter, the wiring system that nerve cells in the brain use to communicate with each other. …
They evaluated 84 U.S. military personnel evacuated to Landstuhl from Iraq and Afghanistan after exposure to many types of explosive blasts. Abnormalities were found in 18 of 63 patients diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury, but not among 21 injured in other ways.
Traumatic brain injuries are estimated to have affected as many as 320,000 military personnel in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of these are classified as mild traumatic brain injuries, also known as concussions.
“We call these injuries ‘mild’, but in reality they sometimes can have serious consequences,” says senior author David L. Brody, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. …
