A traumatic brain injury (TBI) is typically an abrupt disruption in your brain’s normal functionality by an external force, causing injury to your brain. Penetration, blunt force, or jolting, causing your brain to move within your skull, create direct damage to your brain and interference with how you can feel, move, behave, think and function through the rest of your body.
What are the common causes of TBI?
The most common causes of TBI are falls, car accidents, motorcycle accidents, assaults/violence, sports and recreation injuries, and blast injuries, which are common in military settings.
How are TBI’s classified?
TBI’s are classified in 3 categories, depending on severity, mechanism, and injury type. To determine the severity of a TBI, doctors will use the Glascow Coma Scale (GCS), which focuses on your loss of consciousness and memory loss.
Even a mild TBI (concussion) is scored around 13-15 on the GCS, generally meaning that you could have experienced loss of consciousness for 0-30 minutes, confusion or memory loss, headaches, dizziness, nausea, or sensitivity to light. So in the most important sense, there is no such thing as a “mild” or even a “moderate” TBI.
Those classified as a moderate TBI scores from 9-12 on the GCS, where we start to experience loss of consciousness, lasting 30 minutes to 24 hours, and more noticeable cognitive, physical, or behavioral changes in a person who is experiencing moderate TBI.
Finally, a severe TBI scores at 3-8 GCS with loss of consciousness for more than 24 hours, high risk of long-term disability, or death. The classification by mechanism of injury entails Closed TBI, where your skull remains intact, or Penetrating TBI, meaning an object breaks through the skull and damages your brain tissue.
There are several types of brain injuries that could contribute to the diagnosis process. A concussion: temporary disruption of brain function, contusion: bruising of brain tissue, diffuse axonal injury (DAI), widespread damage to nerve fibers from rapid movement or rotation, hematomas: bleeding inside the skull (epidural, subdural, intracerebral), and skull fractures: can accompany or worsen brain injuries.
Classifying TBIs matters because it helps guide doctors in the right direction for your treatment, prognosis, and recovery plans. Mild TBIs can even have serious or long-lasting effects if not properly treated.
Who is MOST at risk of TBI?
We know the types of TBIs, how they are classified, and generally, the most common ways they can occur. But now, let’s discuss who is at the highest risk of a TBI. Maybe you have a pretty good idea of those answers at this point. But let’s go over it with the “why.”
Children (0-4 years) & Older Adults (65+), with falls being the leading cause. Teens & Young Adults (15-24 years) are at higher risk of sports injuries, motor vehicle accidents, and maybe a little “Dare-Devil” mentality or risk-taking behaviors. Athletes in contact sports such as football, hockey, boxing, wrestling, etc., are at high risk due to the nature of their chosen sport.
Military Personnel & Veterans can be exposed to a lot of different things with the risk of TBI: combat injuries, training accidents, and blasts. Substance use can lead to a higher risk of obtaining a TBI as well, for obvious reasons.
Some occupations can put you at high risk for TBI. Those jobs include firefighters, construction workers, roofers, law enforcement officers, etc. People with balance or neurological conditions are also, without needing to say, at high risk for obtaining a TBI, as they are more prone to falls.
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