An estimated 5.3 million Americans currently live with disabilities resulting from brain injury. Each year, an estimated 2 million people sustain traumatic brain injury, and more than 50,000 people die as a result of traumatic brain injuries.

What causes so many Americans to suffer from these types of injuries? Vehicle crashes are the leading cause of brain injury, followed by falls. However, in the elderly, falls top vehicle crashes as the leading cause of brain injury.

Types of Brain Injuries

Acquired brain injury (ABI) is an injury to the brain that is not hereditary, congenital, or degenerative.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an injury to the brain caused by an external physical force such as a car or truck accident. Outcomes may include a diminished or altered state of consciousness, which results in an impairment of cognitive abilities or physical functioning. It can also result in the disturbance of behavioral or emotional functioning. TBI is not degenerative or congenital nature.

Traumatic brain injury may occur in one of two ways:

A closed head injury occurs when the moving head is rapidly stopped, as when hitting a windshield, or when it is hit by a blunt object causing the brain to smash into the hard bony surface inside the skull. Closed head injury may also occur without direct external trauma to the head if the brain undergoes a rapid forward or backward movement, such as when a person experiences whiplash.

A penetrating head injury occurs when a fast moving object such as a bullet pierces the skull.

Head injuries may result in permanent disability. Permanent brain injury can occur without impact to the head and without significant loss of consciousness, even when all imaging studies such as MRI and CT scans are negative. Misdiagnosis and lack of treatment may lead to long-term consequences.

Potential Consequences of Brain Injuries

Both closed and penetrating head injuries may result in localized and widespread, or diffuse, damage to the brain causing:

Cognitive Deficits: Shortened attention span, short-term memory problems, problem solving, acalculia or judgment deficits, alexia, anomia, inability to understand abstract concepts, loss of sense of time and space, anterograde amnesia, identity of self and others.

Motor Deficits: Diplegia, monoplegia, poor balance, lower endurance, adladochokinesia, apraxia, ataxia.

Perceptual Deficits: Acuity in hearing, vision, taste, smell and touch, astereognosia, kinesthesia, left or right side of body neglect, diplopia, scotoma.

Speech Deficits: Speech that is not clear as a result of poor control of the speech muscles and poor breathing patterns, dysarthia.

Language Deficits: Aphasia, aphemia, circumlocution, echolalia, neologism.

Social Difficulties: Impaired social capacity resulting in self-centered behavior.

Regulatory Disturbances: Fatigue and/or changes in sleep patterns, loss of bowel and bladder control, akinetic mutism.

Personality Changes: Apathy, decreased motivation, irritability, depression, temperament, aggression, confabulation, and inappropriate sexual behavior.

Traumatic Epilepsy: Occurs in 2 to 5 percent of people who sustain head injuries. It is possible for epilepsy to surface years after an injury.

Brain Functions

The brain functions as a whole by interrelating its component parts. An injury may disrupt only a particular step of an activity that occurs in a specific part of the brain. Some parts of the brain that may be affected by a brain injury (and what functions that area controls) are the:

Cerebral Cortex

Frontal Lobe: consciousness, initiation of activity, emotional response, judgment, expressive language, memory for motor activities.

Parietal Lobe: visual attention, touch perception, goal directed voluntary movements, manipulation of objects, integration of senses.

Occipital Lobes: vision.

Temporal Lobes: hearing, memory acquisition, some visual perceptions, categorizing objects.

Brain Stem
Breathing, heart rate, swallowing, reflexes to seeing and hearing (startle response), controls sweating, blood pressure, digestion, temperature, affects level of alertness, ability to sleep, sense of balance.

Cerebellum
Coordination of voluntary movement, balance and equilibrium, some memory for reflex motor acts.

Prognosis

The extent of an individual's injuries from brain injury may remain unknown for many months or years.

Morphological changes are associated with individual outcome. Evidence of midline shift, perimesencephalic cistern compression and ventricular system asymmetry along with mass lesion subtype have been evaluated for their predictive value on outcome. Mass lesion subtypes include epidural hematomas (EDH), subdural hematomas (SDH), subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), intracerebral hematomas (ICH) and contusions.

Older individuals more commonly have SDH and a propensity to develop intracranial and extracranial lesions. In the aging brain, widespread depolarization with subsequent release of excitatory neurotransmitters such as glutamate and aspartate is known to follow mechanical impact to the brain.

Brain Injury and Your Case

For a brain injury case to be successful, we must be able to prove the injury. Four factors that will enable a doctor to diagnose, and a lawyer to prove permanent brain injury are:

• Biomechanical Forces;
• One Of The Four Elements Of The Rehab Congress Definition, i.e.:
  • any period of loss of consciousness,
  • a change in mental state as a result of the accident
  • amnesia, or
  • focal neurological deficits;
• Neuropsychological Deficits; and
• A Changed Person.

In terms of money, emotional trauma, limitations, and lost opportunities, the costs to the brain-injured and their loved ones are enormous. The Gervelis Law Firm is experienced in successfully handling brain injury cases. We believe in being an advocate beyond the perimeters of the courtroom and fighting for your rights.

To discuss your Ohio or Pennsylvania brain injury case, contact us today and make an appointment for your free initial consultation.

For information on support groups in your area contact the Ohio Brain Injury Association at 1-800-686-9563.