Anyone who experiences a traumatic brain or spinal cord injury is aware of how significantly his or her life can change within a matter of seconds. The two populations most at risk to sustain brain or spinal cord injuries are drivers and athletes. By being aware of certain information, both these groups can minimize their risk for brain and spinal cord injuries.

How Drivers Can Minimize Risk

There are several ways that drivers can minimize their risk of brain and spinal cord injury:
• Don’t multitask—turn off cell phones and put away anything that may distract you from the task at hand.
• Wear your safety belt.
• Drive defensively.
• Don’t drive under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
• Do not drive when you are fatigued.

How Athletes Can Minimize Risk

There are several ways that athletes can minimize their risk of brain and spinal cord injury:
• Always protective gear that is appropriate to your sport, such as a helmet or padding.
• Be safety conscious, and don’t attempt high-risk stunts or tricks.
• Prepare yourself by knowing what to do should a brain or spinal cord injury occur.

Seek Medical Attention

All the care in the world can’t prevent every brain and spinal cord injury. If you suspect that you or someone you know has sustained a brain or spinal cord injury, seek medical attention immediately. Remember, brain and spinal cord injuries can be caused without any direct impact to the area of injury, and sometimes do not show symptoms for several days or weeks.

Last Friday night Houston Texas receiver Harry Williams sustained a spinal cord injury (SCI) during a game against the Dallas Cowboys leaving him temporarily paralyzed. Monday he underwent surgery to fuse two vertebrae in his spinal column, a procedure that will hopefully allow him to lead a normal life, but won’t put him back in the game.

Williams was only 26, an age that would have given him years more on the field had this accident not happened. An estimated 14 percent of SCIs are a direct result of a sports related injury. Considering that there is about ten thousand new SCIs a year, this is a fairly significant number.

Last year Kevin Everett with the Buffalo Bills football team was paralyzed during a game. He has since recovered his ability to move his arms and legs, but he will never play football again. His recovery from paralysis, along with Williams’, is a rare occurrence as most who experience paralysis stay paralyzed.

There are 31 pairs of nerves that spread out from the spinal cord into the arms, chest, legs and abdomen. The nerves that are in charge of upper body movement are in the upper portion of the spine, while the ones that control the legs are in the lower area. Not only are these nerves responsible for limb movement, they also control basic functions such as breathing and heart beat.

The National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research has reported that in 2006 there were 16 indirect deaths and only one fatality in football, and the death was caused by a SCI. In 2007 there were eight cervical cord injuries with incomplete recoveries. Six of these were at the high school level. The majority of the SCIs occurred in games with only two happening during practice.

Considering that in 2007 there were 1,800,000 football players, these statistics aren’t painting too bleak of a picture. While each injury or fatality is a reason for concern, innovative safety gear has greatly decreased the chance of experiencing an unrecoverable injury. We have neurosurgeons such as Richard C. Schneider to thank for the decrease in permanent spine and head injuries. He helped to develop the football helmets our players currently use which have directly influenced this decrease as documented in the National Football Head and Neck Injury Register.

As researchers come up with better and more intuitive protective gear, we will continue to see these traumatic injuries decrease. In the meantime, those who have had their lives irrevocably changed from a brain or spinal cord injury deserve our continued support.

The importance of the vehicle seat’s role in automobile accidents shouldn’t be overlooked, yet it often is. If you run an Internet search, you will find numerous stories on collapsed seat backs, faulty restraint systems and inadequate load bearing ability - all manufacturer-related issues that have contributed to injury or death in automobile crashes.

One area of concern that is overlooked more than most is that of wheelchairs used in lieu of standard seats in vehicles. For those with disabilities, the act of transferring from a wheelchair to a car seat is often difficult and thus prohibitive. Instead, they often choose to purchase a van or other vehicle with the capacity to hold a wheelchair. Either the back seats are removed or the front passenger seat is in order to create a space for the wheelchair.

Vehicles can be modified to allow room for the wheelchair and the addition of special restraints to offer protection in an accident. While these restraints are tested for strength and comfort, they don’t give the wheelchair the same protective properties as originally equipped manufactured seats would.

Keeping in mind that a stock seat is still no guarantee that the person riding in or near it will be safe in an accident, the idea of a wheelchair providing the same degree of protection is faulty. They simply aren’t built to act as car seats. They haven’t been created to withstand the load placed on them and the occupant during a wreck nor to optimize the protective abilities of the restraints.

A common cause of injury during an accident is seat back failure - when the seat is unable to bear the increased load from the force of the impact added to the weight of the occupant, causing it to collapse. The two most common types are either a failure of the seat to maintain an upright position and the deformation of the actual structure. This usually happens after a rear impact that propels the vehicle forward the person backwards, creating strain on the back of the seat. There have been thousands of life-altering traumatic brain injury (TBI) or spinal cord injury (SCI) cases from these failures.

Properly manufactured seats should be able to bear this additional load as well as prevent the occupant from coming into contact with the vehicle’s interior, but too often they don’t measure up.

Now picture a wheelchair encountering those same circumstances. This chair is designed for comfort, ease of transportation and maneuverability - not impact resistance. The Subcommittee on Wheelchairs and Transportation (SOWHAT) has been pushing for better wheelchair standards, ones that will protect a passenger during motor vehicle transportation. They call for an emphasis on “design requirements, test procedures, and performance criteria” that will provide the necessary stability, restraint and strength.

SOWHAT’s earlier efforts in the 1990s to have ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, approve WC-19-Wheelchairs Used as Seats in Motor Vehicles has been approved, but it does not address every issue or concern posed, most notably it does not cover protection from rear impacts or rollovers.

To find out how you can better protect yourself or the wheelchair user in your life, check out the Ride Safe online brochure. They provide step by step instructions on how to best secure a wheelchair and its occupant while in a motor vehicle. They also list tips for selecting a wheelchair and tiedown equipment.

Remember that feeling of invincibility that you had as a teenager? For most of us, that feeling is almost unrecognizable now that life has caught up with us and we are aware of just how delicate life can be.

Dr. Najma Ahmed, the assistant director of trauma at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, says that this feeling of invincibility is preventable. “Teenage drivers have the highest rate of injury and death from motor vehicle crashes of any demographic group in Canada,” says the Canadian Press, and most of these teens are oblivious to their danger.

Dr. Ahmed says “It’s my job, our job to save them.” With a new program at St. Michael’s, she is hoping to do just that. A study of 260 adolescents found that when teens met with their peers who had sustained paralysis or another such life altering injury, they were most likely to alter their attitude and behavior in regards to taking the risk of damage or death seriously.

Dr. Ahmed is promoting the ThinkFirst Injury Prevention Strategy for Youth (TIPSY) at St. Michael’s, a program that takes teens to see first hand what can happen to them. Some of the situations included visiting young victims of accidents in the ICU unit, a situation that worked to bring the intended point home.

Researchers are hoping that programs such as this will spread as parents begin to realize the importance of prevention. Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) or spinal cord injuries (SCI) are just some of the life changing results of a teen driving too fast and losing control of their car.

With early education, such as is given through TIPSY, the researchers at St. Michael’s hope to greatly minimize these traumatic situations as more youth leave behind the idea that “it can’t happen to me”.

As summer sports season starts to wane and fall rests on the horizon, we’d like to remind everyone of the need to deck kids out in the proper safety equipment for their sport.

According to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, an estimated 4.4 million kids between the ages of five and 18 are treated in emergency rooms each year for sports related injuries. The use of some simple protective gear will go a long way to help minimize harmful effects.

Helmets help to prevent concussions which can be caused by a blow or jolt to the head in sports such as football, baseball and softball. Children are resilient, and often will be up and running around shortly after an injury, so it’s important to check them for signs of dizziness, feelings of being faint or lapses in memory. All of these symptoms are indicators of a potential concussion.

Dr. Divine, the director for the center, stressed in a recent Medical News Today article the need for “coaches, trainers and parents to be observant of head injury symptoms because athletes may not report them…of utmost importance, athletes younger than 18 who have any post-blow-to-the-head symptoms affecting their thought process should not return to the same practice, game or contest and be evaluated by a physician prior to return to play.”

If you’ve visited our site before, then you know by now that we are big fans of helmets, so when effective and inspirational techniques are created to promote their use, we applaud!

Richard Degener writes about a new Cape May program designed to increase both helmet use by kids and foster positive reactions to police officers. This clever idea has police giving out “positive tickets” to children who are wearing helmets while riding their bikes.

Cape May is one of 75 towns in New Jersey that are participating in this program, which is trying to reach children under 16 years old as that is the legal limit on required helmet use. The organization recognizes that the preteen to teen age group tends to be more likely to rebel against this regulation, so they had to come up with a creative solution that will hopefully help reach these youth.

Wendy Berk, the prevention coordinator for this association, says that statewide use is only around 20 percent, with 230,000 children treated for bicycle injuries last year alone. This same program has been in use for ten years in Cranberry, Middlesex county and according to Berk, helmet usage is up to 94 percent there. These numbers seem to prove the plan’s usefulness over time.

With its high rate of effectiveness, perhaps other states and even countries will consider implementing similar programs. If you have heard of any, please share.

With all the discussion lately about the variety of ways to sustain both head and spinal cord injuries (extreme sports, bike riding, trampolines and so on), it’s refreshing to be able to bring your attention to something that reduces your risk!

University of UBC researchers in Vancouver, Canada have created a helmet that will reduce spinal cord injuries due to a head-first collision by an astounding 56 percent. While still in the design stages, researchers say that it will reduce the load on the neck, preventing fractures and spine injuries by deflecting the head.

Initially this helmet will be marketed towards hockey players and then will begin to target other sports activities.

As we reported in an early article about Promising SCI Studies, one of the major barriers to proper spinal cord healing is the formation of scar tissue in reaction to the injury. It turns out, hypothermia therapy, which had been regarded as a possible immediate treatment for traumatic brain injury, may also be of use in SCI survivors. Cooling the patient’s body temperature for a period of 2 days or so prevents swelling and slows down the spread of secondary injuries in the spinal cord. Read the original story here.

Does it really work though? From what I’ve read, results in TBI survivors have been inconclusive. I’m not sure how much clinical research has been done on this subject. What do you think?