Mild Traumatic Brain Injury may Cause Brain Damage

The study found that patient scores on the verbal letter fluency task, a test of thinking and memory skills, were 25 percent lower than in the healthy people. This was strongly related to the imaging measures of white matter damage.

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"Most of the studies thus far have focused on people with severe and chronic traumatic brain injury," said study author Andrew Blamire, PhD, of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. "We studied patients who had suffered clinically mild injuries often from common accidents such as falling from a bicycle, or slow speed car accidents. This finding is especially important, as 90 percent of all traumatic brain injuries are mild to moderate."

One year after the injury, the scores on thinking and memory tests were the same for people with brain injuries and those with no injuries, but there were still areas of brain damage in people with injuries. "These results show that thinking skills were recovering over time," Blamire said. "The areas of brain damage were not as widespread across the brain as previously, but focused in certain areas of the brain, which could indicate that the brain was compensating for the injuries."

Source: Eurekalert