Blast-Related Injuries Detected in the Brains of US Military Personnel

ScienceDaily (June 2, 2011) — An advanced imaging technique has revealed that some U.S. military personnel with mild blast-related traumatic brain injuries have abnormalities in the brain that have not been seen with other types of imaging.

The abnormalities were found in the brain's white matter, the wiring system that nerve cells in the brain use to communicate with each other.

The study is reported June 2 in The New England Journal of Medicine by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany.

They evaluated 84 U.S. military personnel evacuated to Landstuhl from Iraq and Afghanistan after exposure to many types of explosive blasts. Abnormalities were found in 18 of 63 patients diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury, but not among 21 injured in other ways.

Traumatic brain injuries are estimated to have affected as many as 320,000 military personnel in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of these are classified as mild traumatic brain injuries, also known as concussions.

"We call these injuries 'mild', but in reality they sometimes can have serious consequences," says senior author David L. Brody, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

In the new study, white matter abnormalities were detected using an advanced magnetic resonance imaging method called diffusion tensor imaging. Diffusion tensor imaging allows scientists to assess the movement of water in tissue. Changes in the patterns of water movement are often linked to injury or disease, but the significance of the abnormalities seen in the military service personnel is not yet fully understood.

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How Brain's Memory Center Repairs Damage from Head Injury

ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2011) — Researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have described for the first time how the brain's memory center repairs itself following severe trauma -- a process that may explain why it is harder to bounce back after multiple head injuries.

The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, reports significant learning and memory problems in mice who were unable to create new nerve cells in the brain's memory area, the hippocampus, following brain trauma. The study's senior author, Dr. Steven G. Kernie, associate professor of pediatrics and developmental biology at UT Southwestern, said the hippocampus contains a well of neural stem cells that become neurons in response to injury; those stem cells must grow into functioning nerve cells to mend the damage.

"Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has received a lot of attention recently because of the recognition that both military personnel and football players suffer from debilitating brain injuries," Dr. Kernie said, adding that memory and learning problems are common after repeated severe head injuries.

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Patient's Own Bone Marrow Stem Cells May Provide Treatment for Brain Injuries

ScienceDaily (Mar. 11, 2011) — Stem cells derived from a patient's own bone marrow were safely used in pediatric patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), according to results of a Phase I clinical trial at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The results were published in this month's issue of Neurosurgery, the journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons."Our data demonstrate that the acute harvest of bone marrow and infusion of bone marrow mononuclear cells to acutely treat severe TBI in children is safe," said Charles S. Cox, Jr., M.D., the study's lead author and professor of pediatric neurosurgery at the UTHealth Medical School. The clinical trial, which included 10 children aged 5 to 14 with severe TBI, was done in partnership with Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital, where Cox is director of the pediatric trauma program.All the children were treated within 48 hours of their injury with their own stem cells, which were collected from their bone marrow, processed and returned to them intravenously. UTHealth's Department of Neurology is also currently testing the same bone marrow stem cell procedure in adults with acute stroke. In a separate trial, Cox is testing the safety of using a patient's own cord blood stem cells for traumatic brain injury in children.

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