Causes & Treatment Of Head Injury

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Causes & Treatment Of Head Injury

GCS is a neurological scale which helps assess the level of consciousness in patients who experience a head injury. The modified scoring criteria is between 3 (deep unconsciousness) to 15 (normal). GCS score, along with pupil reaction are the two most important parameters that provide information about the head injury. Besides a GCS score 15, a GCS score of 3 is the most frequent value with admissions of patients with head injury.Causes & Treatment Of Head Injury

This method has become an integral part of clinical practice and is widely used around the globe by doctors, nurses, paramedics for patients from acute medical conditions to intensive care. Every year, an estimated 1.5 million Americans sustain a TBI. As a consequence, approximately 50,000 people die, 230,000 are hospitalized and 80,000-90,000 experience long term disability. The consequences of this debilitating disease include alteration of brain function and the main indicators include decreased level of consciousness, altered mental state, amnesia or neurological deficits.Causes & Treatment Of Head Injury

The causes of TBI in different age groups vary indefinitely. The most common causes for TBI in younger individuals of age 15-25 are contact sports and motor vehicle injury. However, in old people ( >75 years) the most leading cause is fall (51%). The type of injury inflicted for example penetrating (involving the brain substance) and closed head injury (doesn’t penetrate) can also determine the consequences of TBI in a person. The most common complaints after TBI include initial and persistent cognitive deficits. However, risk of epilepsy shortly after TBI is also high.

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There are many possible outcomes of TBI. According to previous researchers TBI caused by blast explosions and blast events had consequences involving functional distress and neuropsychiatric abnormalities in patients. Other literature links TBI with circadian rhythm sleep disorders. It’s correlation with melatonin secretion and rapid eye movement sleep. Patients with TBI suffer more from depressive episodes and anxiety (Schekleton et al.,2010). Similarly, Ayalon and colleagues compared sleeping patterns and melatonin secretion of normal individuals with patients of TBI. Most control patients exhibit 24-hour rhythm of melatonin secretion while patients of TBI had 1-2 hour delayed peak and 2-3 hour delayed nadir. (Ayalon et al.,2007).

There’s also a lot of evidence of work by investigators who used factors like evoked potential responses (Rae-Grant et al., 1996), imaging (Massaro et al., 1996), length of hospitalization (Cowen et al., 1995), and length of coma (Asikainen et al., 1998) etc to assess the patients. The occurrence of TBI is a potential burden in middle eat countries and other developing countries which lack resources and equipments to deal with the casualties. Latin America and Sub saharan Africa demonstrate a higher TBI-related incidence rate varying from 150-170 per 100,000.Causes & Treatment Of Head Injury

As a developing country, with poor traffic control, Pakistan has a higher rate of TBI due to road traffic accidents. The management of the patient after an injury also depends upon the resources, accommodation made available for the victim and the type of hospital one can afford. Our main objective here is to assess the patients physically using GCS scale, check the medicines provided to them, the variations in their heart rate and blood pressure and the kind of head injury endured. All values could help in correlating the disease and it’s outcome whether the result is complete recovery or lingering disability.

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