Apparently, mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is suffered by approximately more than 1 million people every year in USA. But usually, mTBI is trivialized and not given the importance of a critical health condition that it actually is.
Nevertheless, this ‘mild’ type of injury seems to provoke continuing neurological and cognitive issues in several of these patients, thereby demanding a vast emotional and financial toll on society. Douglas Smith, MD, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair and professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, apparently provided discoveries on the molecular mechanism at play in mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), usually called concussions.
In spite of the occurrence and effect of mTBI, not much is identified about how mTBI may influence nerve cells and connections in the brain, and consequently clinical results post injury. Smith and colleagues have supposedly started to gather data from human and animal studies on mTBI at 2-4 days following injury by means of superior neuroimaging methods.
Apparently, they have also discovered diverse alterations all through the white matter in the brain. Additionally, protein markers of brain pathology seem to be recognized post mTBI in the blood of mTBI patients.
Smith and his team apparently suggest a likely molecular means to clarify their discoveries. Particularly, they determine that the stretching and disconnecting of nerve-cell axons subsequent to mTBI may provoke issues in the sodium channels discovered on the surface of neurons.
The research was presented at the 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego.