Head Trauma and Its Effects

Head trauma is an incredibly enormous public health problem as it is one of the most common forms of bodily injuries that occur today. Traumatic brain injuries can cause little to no permanent damage to disability to death. More than $25 billion is spent each year in the United States on patient care when dealing with head trauma. The majority of head trauma injuries occur in adolescents and young adults. There are over 200 cases per 100,000 people in the United States each year involving head trauma. The United States has a population over 300 million, with close to 600,000 new head trauma cases occurring each year. 10 percent of those cases are fatalities which results in 550,000 people being hospitalized with head trauma injuries.

Head injuries can occur when people are playing sports, riding motorcycles without helmets, swimming, fooling around on solid ground and when people are involved in motor vehicle accidents. There are two main forms of head trauma; closed head injury and penetrating head injury. Head injuries occur all too often, especially in sports, which is why baseball, football, hockey, softball field hockey and lacrosse players are required to wear helmets during practices and games. Head injuries can occur to baseball and softball players when they are batting (being hit in the head with a pitched ball) or when they are in the field (being hit in the head by a batted ball). Head injuries can occur to football players during helmet to helmet hits on the football field.

There are five main symptoms that can appear in people with possible head trauma. Those five main symptoms are a cloudy consciousness, lethargy, obtundation, stupor, coma and brain death. A cloudy consciousness is when the brain processes information at slower speeds than normal. Memory of recent events becomes diminished but long-term memory is still intact. Cloudy consciousness can occur after mild to moderate head trauma and may persist for several months following the injury. Lethargy is defined as a decrease in alertness. This then results in impaired ability to perform tasks that normally aren't difficult to perform.

Obtundation is defined as a decrease in awareness and alertness in which patients are unaware of their surroundings. Patients can be stimulated to respond to others but once the stimuli are removed they return to their state of inactivity. Stupor is defined as the inability to communicate clearly by patients but can be aroused by continued painful stimulation. When a patient is in a coma he or she does not respond to any stimuli presented by the medical staff. Brain death is defined as functional decapitation and is characterized by irreversible cessation of whole-brain function.

Doctors, to determine that a person is brain dead will perform the following list of tests on the patient with the head injury. The tests include confirming the patient is in a coma, evaluate the patient for seizures, test for motor response to painful stimulation, test for pupillary response to light, test for corneal reflex, test for oculocephalogyric reflex, test for vestibule-ocular reflex, test for upper and lower airway stimulation, test for gag reflex, perform apnea tests, perform an EEG and perform a cerebral angiography.