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TBI Recovery in Older Persons

It used to be thought that the supply of brain cells (neurons) one was born with were meant to last a lifetime and would never increase. Now it is known that brains can use stem cells to generate new neurons which helps with preserving memories, new learning, and trauma recovery. It is also

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Suicide, Self-Acceptance and Traumatic Brain Injury

The December 2007 issue of Brain Injury states that people with a traumatic brain injury are at 3-4 times the risk of suicide than the general population. Why is that? Frequently it is depression over inability to perform life tasks (including self-care, work, and/or relationships) with hopelessness that things will ever change. Attitude

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Why are Two Concussions Close in Time so Damaging?

On 11/16/14  Zachary Weil and colleagues from Ohio State University  presented the answer to this question at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Dr. Weil shared his research on how mice respond to two concussions. After the first concussion the mouse brain ramps us its use of glucose to power repair

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New 3D Model of the Human Brain Opens Research Windows

A team of neuroscientists in Germany led by Dr. Katrin Amunts has developed a new 3D model of the human brain. As announced on 7/16/13 the team took 7,400 super thin sections of the brain of a deceased 65 year old woman in excellent health and digitized them into a 3D model on

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Damage to Areas Makes TBI Worse

How come people with traumatic brain injuries have such different neuropsychological outcomes — with some people gradually returning to normal (or near-normal) and others having very significant and permanent problems? For decades neurologist have used a measure of the severity of brain injury called the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) to predict outcomes. Although

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First PET Scan to Detect Concussional Dementia in Living Patient

In September 2014 Dr. Samuel Gandy of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai published a cases study in the journal Translational Psychiatry detailing the use of PET scanning with a radioactive tracer called [18 F]-T807 which can diagnose dementia from significant concussive damage in a living patient’s brain. The new technique

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Xenon Gas Limits Brain Damage After TBI

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) from a car crash or fall is initially a mechanical process involving bruising of brain tissue. The worst damage from TBI comes hours/days later when a bio-chemical process of inflammation and cell death occurs. Scientists have been trying for decades to understand and halt this secondary process. One way

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Diffusion Tensor Imaging Tracks Chronic Traumatic Brain Injury

On July 21. 2014, researchers from the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas published a study in the Journal of Neurotrauma, seeking to correlate the appearance of white matter damage from TBI with cognitive problems. Using the technique known as Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) the researchers found that as

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