Back from a brief break, finals looming

Not much "new" by way of news, but the semester is coming to a close and one colleage tells me of college students attempting to schedule formal neuropsychological evaluations to be completed before the end of the semester to document learning disabilities.

This got me reading, and this article mentions student grades being affected by concussion:

...who is enrolled in honors courses, is concussed, he suffers from headaches and a lack of concentration. "It feels like you have a haze over you, a fog, kind of," he said, adding that his grade-point average dipped from about a 3.57 to a 2.71 in the fall when he had trouble focusing after his football concussion.

"He's in all really, really intense classes, so concussions have much more effect there than on the field," said his mother...

Luckily, the focus on professional athletes denying concussions has raised awareness at the lower, youth, levels (ref), or so says a prominent sports agent:

Steinberg, who helped organize the summit along with the Sports Concussion Institute, is sponsoring a California program that will institute so-called "baseline testing" in 1,400 high schools, where athletes are given a cognitive exam that can be repeated after injuries to measure brain impairment.

or, as David Hovda so aptly stated:

"I don't know what's so mild about mild traumatic brain injury," said David Hovda, director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center.

Hidden Wounds of War

I guess I am in a political mood as of late, as this article caught my eye this morning:

Some 1.6 million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 31,000 have been wounded in action and many more have sustained non-combat injuries or illness. TBI has been called the "signature injury" of this war, and the improvised explosive device (IED) is the leading cause of fatalities and brain injuries..

These powerful devices inflict severe damage and blast shock waves through the body, including sudden and violent impact to the skull causing damage to brain tissue. The resulting TBI can be fatal, or require immediate hospitalization. But more often the result of exposure is a less obvious concussion.

Despite the high incidence, there is little by way of diagnosis, let alone treatment:

Current estimates are that 10 percent to 20 percent of all U.S. military personnel in Iraq suffer concussion. Army studies show less than half of those exposed to IED blasts receive any evaluation.

In the environment of war, such symptoms can go unnoticed and unreported. Experience from sports and other noncombat injuries has shown that if an injured individual sustains a second concussion before resolving symptoms from a previous injury, a "second impact syndrome" can occur with dire, even life-threatening consequences. Repeated concussions cause cumulative damage and slow recovery.