Sticks and stones may break your bones, but modern medicine usually helps you get back to normal quickly. Though fractures and other injuries may case aches and pains and damaged ligaments and joints may never be exactly the same as they once were, the scars left by a traumatic brain injury (TBI) often manifest in less visible ways; ways that researchers and clinicians have only just begun to really understand.
“Injuries that cause visible physical disabilities—those that may result in paralysis, or the need for casts and wheelchairs—were long considered to be ‘diseases of the body,’ and diseases that result in disabilities such as personality changes, mood disorders, anxiety, insomnia, addiction, and trouble with memory and attention, were thought of as ‘diseases of the soul.’ But that’s changed,” says Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, associate director for Clinical Research in Penn’s Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair, the presidential professor of Neurology, and the director of the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinical Research Initiative at Penn Medicine. “We know now that brain injuries are not an injury of the soul. A traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a disease of the body—it affects the whole nervous system. The brain is a complex organ, and even though we can’t see its scars in the same way we can see them from other injuries, they are certainly there long after a patient has been treated and ‘recovered.’”
According to the CDC, in the United States alone, an estimated 2.5 million people sustain a TBI each year, and of them, 52,000 die and 280,000 are hospitalized. More than 2.2 million are treated and released from an emergency department, but the impact of a TBI can last well beyond a hospital visit, and without proper attention and care, can change the course of a person’s life.
Read the full story at the Penn One Health website.
