What is traumatic brain injury?
Traumatic brain injury, which is also known as a brain injury or head injury, occurs when a blow or jolt to the head results in damage to the brain. And a traumatic brain injury can range in severity from mild to severe. A mild traumatic brain injury occurs when a person has a brief change in their mental status or a loss of consciousness. It’s most commonly known as a concussion and often goes undiagnosed and therefore the person who suffers that type of loss doesn’t usually get the benefits that they need. Severe traumatic brain injury involves a loss of consciousness for hours or days or weeks and can result in permanent disability.
What is anoxic brain injury?
Anoxic brain injury, also called a cerebral hypoxia, is a serious life-threatening injury. It can cause cognitive problems and disabilities. It occurs partially because of a lack of oxygen. The term “hypoxic” means partial or lack of, and other hypoxic injuries or anoxic injuries can also occur because of a complete lack of oxygen. Obviously the greater the loss of oxygen, the more widespread and serious the injury will be.
What is CTE brain injury?
CTE or chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in athletes or others who have a history of repetitive brain trauma including symptomatic concussions or multiple hits to the head. CTE has been known to effect boxers and there’s a record of it dating back to the 1920s.
CTE currently can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem, meaning after death when they actually look at the brain itself, and normally occurs in, as I said before, individuals who have been subjected to repetitive traumatic brain injuries, accelerations of the head on impact, or subsequent repetitive brain trauma.
CTE can occur from frequent concussions from playing contact sports like American football, ice hockey, boxing or wrestling.Other individuals who have been diagnosed with CTE have been those involved in military service as well as people who have histories of chronic seizures, histories of domestic abuse or some type of repetitive head injuries.
What is the leading cause of death related to TBI?
The leading cause of TBI-related death varies by age. Falls are the leading cause of death for persons 65 years or older. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of traumatic brain injury deaths for children and young adults ages 5 to 24 and assaults are the leading cause for children from 0 to 4 years of age.
What causes traumatic brain injury?
From 2006 to 2010, falls were the leading cause of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) accounting for about 40 percent of all traumatic brain injuries in the United States that would have resulted in an emergency visit or hospitalization or death. Falls disproportionately affect both the youngest and oldest age groups. Unintentional blunt-force trauma, being hit by an object of some sort, was the second-leading cause of TBI and it counted for about 15 percent of all traumatic brain injuries in the U.S., withclose to a quarter of those were in children less than 15 years of age.
Among all age groups, motor vehicle crashes were the third overall leading cause of traumatic brain injury, about 14 percent. When you look at just traumatic brain injury deaths, motor vehicle crashes were the second-leading cause, about 26 percent. About 10 percent of traumatic brain injuries are due to assaults. Every day 138 people in the United States die from injuries that include traumatic brain injuries.
How much compensation for brain injury?
Well, there are many factors that determine the amount of compensation you can receive for a brain injury. They include things such as the extent of the injury, meaning how severe the traumatic brain injury was, the age of the injured party, who’s responsible for the injury, how much insurance coverage is available to compensate someone for that injury. All of these are specific factors to look at when trying to determine range or value for compensation.
How long does a brain injury take to recover?
Recovery for a brain injury completely depends upon the injury itself and the severity. There are many people who can never recover from a traumatic brain injury. It just depends on the extent of the injury. If it’s something that’s causing small symptoms from a concussion, you can see a resolution of those symptoms sometimes within hours, sometimes within days, and then those who have a severe brain injury may never recover from that type of an injury.
How do you improve memory after a brain injury?
You can improve memory after a brain injury depending upon, again, the severity of that type of injury. There are specific rehabilitative exercises that can be performed both inpatient and outpatient to work on your memory skills and again, those depend upon the extent of the injury and the type of rehabilitation program that an injury victim is undergoing.
What is moderate brain injury?
A moderate brain injury is a term used when a person experiences changes in brain function for longer than a few minutes following a trauma. It’s normally symptoms that are similar to a mild traumatic brain injury, but those symptoms do not usually go away or over time may get worse. So the person is obviously coherent, maybe experiencing headaches or dizziness, and they last longer obviously than a few minutes, but over time don’t go away.
Can brain injury result from medical malpractice or negligence?
It can. Every medical procedure, especially those where you are receiving anesthesia, runs a risk that you may be deprived of oxygen. When your brain is deprived of oxygen, that’s when a brain injury can occur and so there are traumatic brain injuries that do occur during a medical procedure and they may or may not be the fault of the physician. So it’s something you need to consult with a lawyer to determine if in fact there was medical negligence.