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- The Battle Against Traumatic Brain Injury On The Frontline
The Battle Against Traumatic Brain Injury on the Frontline
23/11/2009
Improved medical care on the battlefield is helping to save lives and limit the impact of severe brain injuries in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
British medical care teams have developed new emergency response “crack” teams with medical staff and their equipment being sent to the battlefield in a Chinook helicopter, saving critical time in the so called “golden hour” after injury.
If the casualty can be safely transported to medical base hospitals in Kandahar or Bastion, consultants can then work on the soldier or civilian, who can be given early CT scans to check for brain injuries within half an hour of arrival.
New advances in technology are also being looked at that could lead to further improvements in armed forces survival rates, and earlier recovery from serious head injuries.
Bomb blasts from road-side bombs, which account for over 90% of UK deaths in Afghanistan, inflict severe trauma on the brain both from the immediate impact when tissues and blood vessels become damaged, and then from secondary changes later resulting in the death of further brain cells. Such secondary damage can become irreversible in as little as 90 minutes, and accounts for the many of the chronic trauma damage cases.
Rates of concussive brain injury are higher than expected in the recent counter insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan due to the greater reliance on improvised explosives by insurgents.
Studies have shown that cooling the brain can dramatically protect the brain from suffering secondary damage. The difficulty is finding the right cooling temperature to slow the trauma without causing damage to the brain through freezing. Specialist labs in the UK and the USA are working on trying to develop and improve the process so that it can be used to good effect in battlefield hospitals. The challenge for medics- and military planners- will be to develop an effective way of delivering high-tech improvements into a combat zone quickly and effectively.
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