Understanding the impact of concussions on the brain

What a con­cus­sion looks like inside your brain (PBS):

• “But what hap­pens to the brain right after a con­cus­sion? Researchers at the Nation­al Insti­tute of Health peered into the brains of mice and watched how a trau­mat­ic brain injury pro­gress­es over a day. Their find­ings, pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature this week, showed that a sin­gle con­cus­sion can cause cell death in the brain in a mat­ter of hours…This dam­age was the result of a sin­gle injury, sim­i­lar to what LaTour had observed in patients com­ing to the emer­gency room after car acci­dents or falling 6 feet from a lad­der. The injury isn’t fatal, but the con­cus­sion leaves a scar on your brain. Our bod­ies don’t replace dead neu­rons, McGav­ern said. Your brain can com­pen­sate for it, and work around it, but it will nev­er be the same…The most impor­tant les­son from this exper­i­ment, McGav­ern said, is that when it comes to deal­ing with a trau­mat­ic brain injury, every minute counts.”

Study: Tran­scra­nial ame­lio­ra­tion of inflam­ma­tion and cell death after brain injury (Nature)

• Abstract: Trau­mat­ic brain injury (TBI) is increas­ing­ly appre­ci­at­ed to be high­ly preva­lent and dele­te­ri­ous to neu­ro­log­i­cal func­tion. At present, no effec­tive treat­ment options are avail­able, and lit­tle is known about the com­plex cel­lu­lar response to TBI dur­ing its acute phase. To gain insights into TBI patho­gen­e­sis, we devel­oped a nov­el murine closed-skull brain injury mod­el that mir­rors some patho­log­i­cal fea­tures asso­ci­at­ed with mild TBI in humans and used long-term intrav­i­tal microscopy to study the dynam­ics of the injury response from its incep­tion. Here we demon­strate that acute brain injury induces vas­cu­lar dam­age, meningeal cell death, and the gen­er­a­tion of reac­tive oxy­gen species (ROS) that ulti­mate­ly breach the glial lim­i­tans and pro­mote spread of the injury into the parenchyma…Our results shed light on the acute cel­lu­lar response to TBI and pro­vide a means to local­ly deliv­er ther­a­peu­tic com­pounds to the site of injury.