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.

This week’s technology report isn’t on something you can use - yet. ScienceDaily reports that a team at the University of Reading has created a robot that is controlled by an actual biological brain. This has a great deal of potential applications as it continues to develop and become more complex.

Using cultured neurons, the scientists developed this brain in a move to determine how memories manifest and how the brain “stores specific pieces of data”. The neurons are placed into a dish called a multi-electrode array (MEA) that has 60 electrodes which pick up the electrical signals sent by the cells. These signals are what determine how the robot moves.

As researchers figure out how to get the robot to learn, they hope to be able to watch the actual process of how memories manifest themselves when the robot travels over known territory.

Knowing more about how memory forms will help researchers understand how memory is damaged in a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and eventually, how to repair it!

To keep an eye on this research, visit the University of Reading.

Science Daily has released an article regarding a study on brain plasticity from neuroscientists at Children’s Hospital Boston that has the potential to help patients heal from a brain injury.

Otx2, a protein that is manufactured in the retina, has been found to initiate a state of “heightened brain plasticity” in mice. This state of plasticity allows the brain to make new neural connections, leading to an increased ability to learn new things.

Imagine your brain being able to re-connect the portions that control memory, learning and physical stability with the application of eye drops…it’s not a reality for humans yet, but with the continued research into this area, it may be in the near future.

Takao Hensch from the Neurobiology Program and Department of Neurology at Children’s Hospital Boston has suggested that auditory and olfactory senses, along with others, may play a part in turning this critical period of the brain on.

It’s interesting to think that the eyes tell the brain when to begin learning. It’s as though when the eyes are fully prepared to document what is going on around us, they then send a signal to the brain telling it to begin “maturing”. The researchers involved with this study injected Otx2 directly into the brain’s cortex, and found that it had the same plasticity reaction that was produced in a natural setting.

These results are what leads us to hope for a convenient method of activating this protein transmission, such as the eye drops mentioned in the Science Daily article. Time will tell!

The enzyme chondroitinase seems to have a beneficial effect on nerve damage. Plasticity, which allows the brain to make new connections after old ones are damaged, is crucial for recovery after a brain or spine injury, and scar tissue can interfere with this process.

A team of researchers from the Centre for Brain Repair in Cambridge studied the use of this enzyme that is used by bacteria in order to invade cells on rats with spinal cord injuries. Chondriotinase goes after the molecules (chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans) that create the scar tissue that blocks the formation of new nerve connections.

Used alone, chondriotinase had little benefit to the lab rats, but when combined with rehabilitation, there was a significant improvement. “The discovery opens up the possibility that rehabilitation for neurological conditions can be made much faster and more effective by giving treatment such as chondroitinase to make the nervous system plastic,” said lead researchers Professor James Fawcett and Dr. Guillermo Garcia-Alias.

According to Dr. Mark Bacon with Spinal Research, the next step will be figuring out how to administer this “bacterial protein” in a safe manner to humans with spinal cord injuries.

Click here for the BBC article, and here for image origin.

Concussions, it would seem, are not gender neutral.

A study released from the Department of Orthopaedics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center found that a patient’s recovery from a concussion varies greatly between men and women, with women recovering slower. A concussion, caused by a blow to the head through sports, car accidents, etc., affects various cognitive functions from memory to speech.

The findings underscore that men and women shouldn’t be administered to in the same way when it comes to treating a concussion. The study tested memory, attention, processing speed and reaction time in men and women after a concussion. The results were that females had more symptoms, slower reaction time and decreased verbal memory and processing speed than men.

The study also looked at people with a prior history of head trauma and found that they too performed poorly on the follow-up tests.

Researchers aren’t sure exactly what accounts for the difference in recovery processes between men and women, but they have ruled out size difference being a determining factor. When it comes to traumatic brain injury, every little bit counts. Knowing how different brains react to an injury will help doctors determine more effective methods for influencing recovery.

Original story here. (American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (2008, July 10). Men And Women With History Of Concussion Mend Differently, Study Finds.)

According to a report by clinical scientists from NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, traumatic brain injury patients should be given nutritional supplements as soon as possible following the injury.

The recommended intake is through a gastric feeding tube, and if done timely enough, can increase a TBI patient’s chance of survival four-fold. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that optimal nutrition will improve your health and chances of healing, but this study from the Journal of Neurosurgery found that the nutritional supplementation recommended for the first week of recovery isn’t enough.

For optimal benefits, supplements need to be taken as soon as it is medically possible. The best outcome for TBI patients came from a minimum of 25kcal/kg each day, an amount that provides the body with what it needs to properly repair the complex damage in the brain.

Doctor Paul Harch has been studying the effects of hyperbaric oxygen therapy on more than 500 patients with brain injuries. He claims to that the high doses of oxygen stimulates the brain’s ability to repair itself.

Examples of those this therapy has helped include a Florida judge who says he experienced improved cognition, word finding and balance - all areas that were damaged when he suffered a traumatic brain injury in Afghanistan.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy has been used for Autism, decompression sickness in deep sea divers, gas embolism, CO poison, smoke inhalation, migrains, burns and a variety of other medical conditions. It increases neuronal energy metabolism in the brain, wakes up sleeping brain cells, enhances the immune system, reduces tissue swelling and deactivates toxins among other benefits.

As more studies are done and applications documented regarding oxygen therapy’s application to TBI, hopefully there will be an increase in patients with improved functioning.