In the February 2013 issue of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, Dr. Gary Smalls and colleagues published research on their use of PET scans to search for abnormal deposits of tau protein in the brains of living people. Excessive tau has been correlated medically with such degenerative brain conditions as Alzheimer’s disease

Marie Dahdah, PhD, an investigator at the Baylor Institute for Rehabilitation in Texas, published a study 21 brain injury rehab centers in the United States in December 2013. Each of the centers was part of a national model systems program. At the outset of the study Dr. Dahdah expected to find fairly uniform

Severe depression with insomnia and fatigue is relatively common following TBI. In patients with severe depression who were undergoing therapy and taking anti-depressants but showed only limited improvement, adding the wakefulness drug Modafinil produced a better outcome. This was especially true for the depressed patients in a group of 1,010 depressed patients for

In the September 2013 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Dr. David Cook of VA Puget Sound Health Care System and University of Washington described some startling findings. Dr. Cook and his co-researcher Dr. Ibolja Cernak of the University of Alberta subjected mice to isolated shock waves similar to the kind suffered

TBI is a form of brain damage that decreases the number of healthy brain cells and disrupts functional brain networks. If it is serious enough a TBI can cause disability with job and income loss leading to loss of socio-economic status and self-esteem. When you can’t work and you can’t pay your bills

The human brain contains mu-opioid receptors which block pain when activated by substances including mu-opioid and morphine. Alex DaSilva, assistant professor of prosthodontics at the University of Michigan has discovered that applying low dose electricity to the brain through electrodes on the scalp can trigger the release of mu-opioid and block certain types

On October 25, 2013 Matthew C. Wylie, MD, presented a paper to the American Academy of Pediatrics called “Depression in Children Diagnosed with Brain Injury or Concussion.” Using data from the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health, Dr. Wylie identified more than 2,000 children with brain injuries, reflecting the national child brain injury

CT scans and MRIs do not show mild TBI because mild TBI exists at the microscopic level unlike severe or moderate TBI which are accompanied by macroscopic bruising, swelling or bleeding of brain tissue. Some clever neuroscientists at the University of Virginia have just found a way to detect mild TBI using a

University of Wisconsin geneticist Barry Ganetzky concluded that we know very little about how head trauma triggers neurodegeneration of the brain following TBI, and that’s because of legal and ethical restrictions on human experimentation. After looking around for a suitable non-human candidate for TBI research he hit on the fruit fly. The fruit