Blows To The Head Lead To Vision Loss

Blows To The Head Lead To Vision Loss.
As more scrutinize focuses on the deface concussions can cause, scientists now announce that even mild blows to the employer might affect memory and thinking. In this latest study, different helmets were used on football and ice hockey players during their seasons of play. None of the players were diagnosed with a concussion during the bone up period, but the extra helmets recorded key data whenever the players received milder blows to the head resource. "The accelerometers in the helmets allowed us to add up and quantify the ardour and frequency of impacts," said reading author Dr Tom McAllister.

And "We observation it might result in some interesting insights". The researchers found that the expanse of change in the brain's white matter was greater in those who performed worse than expected on tests of retention and learning. White substance transports messages between different parts of the brain. "This suggests that concussion is not the only mechanism we need to pay concentration to," said McAllister, chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

So "These athletes didn't have a concussion diagnosis in the year we well-thought-out them and there is a subsample of them who are literary perchance more helpless to impact. We need to learn more about how long these changes after and whether the changes are permanent". The study was published online Dec 11, 2003 in the annual Neurology. Concussions are equable traumatic brain injuries that occur from a sudden blow to the climax or body.

Symptoms include headache, blurry vision and difficulty sleeping or assessment clearly. Research on repetitive brain impacts not associated with diagnosed concussions is insignificant and contradictory, the researchers said. McAllister, who conducted the analysis while affiliated with Dartmouth College, compared 80 concussion-free varsity football and ice hockey players wearing specialized helmets to 79 athletes in noncontact sports.

He evaluated them before and after the occasion with intellect scans and lore and recall tests. A total of 20 percent of the contact-sport players and 11 percent of the noncontact athletes performed worse on a investigation of articulated learning and memory at the end of the season, a decline expected in less than 7 percent of a regular population. Those performing worse exhibited more changes in the corpus callosum department of the discernment - a bundle of nerves connecting the left and right sides of the percipience - than athletes who scored as predicted.

Dr Howard Derman, co-director of the Methodist Concussion Center in Houston, said he wasn't surprised by the findings. He said blows to the conduct without a reported concussion might cause imagination disfigure that doesn't bring up symptoms.

Derman said future research on this topic would be illuminating if, with custom equipped helmets, blood flow and pressure changes in the sagacity could be measured during repetitive head blows. "If you can detail that there are changes to the brain and there haven't been significant blows, it would be even more of a concern. We have to suppose there is some cumulative effect, with multiple blows causing the problem. It's as though bending a piece of plastic once - nothing happens transforming growth factor beta induced protein ig h3. But if you do it 40 times, you interfere the plastic".