Blows To The Head Lead To Vision Loss

Blows To The Head Lead To Vision Loss.
As more dig into focuses on the cost concussions can cause, scientists now report that even mild blows to the administer might affect memory and thinking. In this latest study, special helmets were used on football and ice hockey players during their seasons of play. None of the players were diagnosed with a concussion during the exploration period, but the valued helmets recorded key data whenever the players received milder blows to the head stop smoking. "The accelerometers in the helmets allowed us to enumerate and quantify the intensity and frequency of impacts," said turn over author Dr Tom McAllister.

And "We thought it might end in some interesting insights". The researchers found that the extent of change in the brain's white matter was greater in those who performed worse than expected on tests of retention and learning. White matter transports messages between other parts of the brain purchase. "This suggests that concussion is not the only thing we need to pay publicity to," said McAllister, chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

So "These athletes didn't have a concussion diagnosis in the year we forced them and there is a subsample of them who are perhaps more helpless to impact. We need to learn more about how long these changes last and whether the changes are permanent". The chew over was published online Dec 11, 2003 in the journal Neurology. Concussions are lenient traumatic brain injuries that occur from a sudden blow to the head or body.

Symptoms include headache, blurry illusion and difficulty sleeping or thinking clearly. Research on repetitive brain impacts not associated with diagnosed concussions is scanty and contradictory, the researchers said. McAllister, who conducted the on while affiliated with Dartmouth College, compared 80 concussion-free varsity football and ice hockey players wearing specialized helmets to 79 athletes in noncontact sports.

He evaluated them before and after the ripen with leader scans and learning and memory tests. A total of 20 percent of the contact-sport players and 11 percent of the noncontact athletes performed worse on a trial of verbal culture and memory at the end of the season, a decline expected in less than 7 percent of a normal population. Those performing worse exhibited more changes in the corpus callosum quarter of the brain - a bundle of nerves connecting the port and right sides of the brain - than athletes who scored as predicted.

Dr Howard Derman, co-director of the Methodist Concussion Center in Houston, said he wasn't surprised by the findings. He said blows to the main without a reported concussion might cause imagination damage that doesn't present symptoms.

Derman said future research on this topic would be illuminating if, with specially equipped helmets, blood current and pressure changes in the brain could be measured during repetitive head blows. "If you can instrument that there are changes to the brain and there haven't been significant blows, it would be even more of a concern. We have to assume there is some cumulative effect, with multiple blows causing the problem. It's a charge out of bending a piece of plastic once - nothing happens going here. But if you do it 40 times, you pause the plastic".