Editor's Note

The rising incidence of brain trauma from sports, military blasts, vehicle collisions, and falls prompted the faculties of Case Western Reserve University and its associated medical care programs in Ohio to convene a symposium, with the National Academy of Engineering and ...

Editor’s Note

This paper summarizes a symposium on concussion held at Case Western Reserve University on June 23–24, 2015, and supported in part by the National Academies of Engineering and Medicine.¹ It reviews evidence for the seriousness of the problem of concussion (also called ...

A significant challenge in the diagnosis and management of athletes and military personnel with concussion is the diverse background, training,

 clinical management approach and outcomes used by the multidisciplinary team of clinicians involved. Further challenging the continuity of care is ...

The current method of diagnosing a concussion on the athletic field, battlefield, or even in the emergency department is unreliable and likely inaccurate: It relies on self-report of symptoms from the person who is injured or from a witness, if there is one. The symptoms that indicate concussion ...

A person can have functional abnormalities of the brain in the absence of symptoms and a diagnosis of concussion. This creates particular risks for athletes, as injury may go undetected during and even after a drill or game.

What can be done to reduce the risk of concussion and subconcussive head ...

More than 30 clinical trials of pharmaceutical products to treat traumatic brain injury (TBI) have failed and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved any diagnostics or therapies for TBI.

Since 2007 the Department of Defense (DOD) has been the largest funder of TBI research. ...

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the national governing body of intercollegiate varsity athletics. About 460,000 student-athletes from 1,100 schools are involved in the organization, which represents 23 sports and 90 national championships. The NCAA has taken a leadership role ...

Explosive blast–related traumatic brain injury (TBI), specifically primary blast- or shockwave-related TBI, is highly prevalent among military personnel. The majority of battlefield wounds in 21st century military conflicts are due to explosive devices—in the recent wars in Iraq and ...

Biomechanics can provide insight into the mechanisms of concussion, including the interrelationships among the forces experienced during impact, head and neck movements, tissue stiffness of the materials that compose the head/neck complex, deformation of structures at the macroscopic and ...

The variety of clinical symptoms associated with boxing was first described in 1928 by Harrison Martland, who found abnormalities in “nearly one half of the fighters who have stayed in the game long enough.” The general public referred to the condition as “punch drunk,” ...

In the past 10 years, traffic deaths have dropped by about 25 percent (NHTSA 2015b), which is a remarkable public health improvement in a short period of time. Even so, nearly 90 people die and 2.3 million are injured every day in motor vehicle crashes in the United States (NHTSA 2015c). The ...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) represents a major public health issue in the United States: it is estimated that 5.3 million Americans have long-term disabilities related to a TBI (Thurman et al. 1999), equivalent to the number of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (Alzheimer’s Association ...

The goal of our research is to determine the forces transmitted to the brain resulting from the stress field of a military blast, fall, or sport or vehicle collision involving the head. This information is essential to link the external insult to the mechanism of brain tissue injury.

...

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), with or without loss of consciousness, is the most frequent form of TBI in US troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan (Warden 2006). In 2006, as the director of neurology for the Department of Veterans Affairs, I was involved in setting up TBI care networks in ...

The interchangeable terms concussion and mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) denote the phenomenon of a change in brain function associated with blunt trauma to the head or body. Beyond the fact that concussion can occur without the victim losing consciousness, researchers are only just beginning to ...

The Purdue Neurotrauma Group began in 2009 to study causes and consequences of concussion in youth athletes in an effort to understand why, in a two-player collision that produced a diagnosed injury, it was only one—rather than each—athlete that evidenced symptoms. Our work applies the ...

Tom Scholz is a musician, inventor, engineer, philanthropist, and founder of the band Boston.

RON LATANISION (RML): We are delighted to speak with someone who is both a mechanical engineering student from MIT and a rock icon. Music is certainly part of our social fabric that everyone appreciates, ...