Thanks for the reference Peter, just what I'm looking for.
The term mild traumatic brain injury is just a a convention, sometimes
referred to as mild head injury. Only recently has it come to be
recognised that even mild trauma can result in cognitive deficits and
brain damage. Very difficult to measure, quite subtle, and in some
people these deficits persist. Hence I advise parents that if their
kids are always getting concussed through sport than stop them playing
that sport. Animal studies and some human studies indicate that
repeated mild head injury is the biggest risk factor for dementia. If
you find that hard to believe than just watch "The Footy Show".
It appears that post trauma the brain becomes sensitised to further
insult. Complement, a key player in the immune response, is widely
expressed by neurons and glia, and there is also post trauma MHC 1
expression on neurons, making these further susceptible to immune
mediated damage. Studies on aging suggest key inflammatory markers like
CRP and haptoglobin and interleukin 1 are all markers for cognitive
decline. So keeping that immune system in check becomes a problem with
age, somewhat paradoxical given it stops working so well ... .
John.
Peter F wrote:
> "Tracking the recovery of visuospatial attention deficits in mild traumatic
> brain injury"
>> [Headline to an article by Charlene I. Halterman, Jeanne Langan, Anthony
> Drew, Erika Rodriguez, Louis R. Osternig, Li-Shan Chou and Paul van
> Donkelaar
> Department of Human Physiology and Institute of Neuroscience, University of
> Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA]
>> Why write "...mild traumatic brain injury" when it would be
> enough to write "mild brain injury".
>> The word trauma should reserved for pain/distressful and
> inescapable predicaments, any distressful actention to which
> becomes automatically prevented ultimately thanks to the effect of
> opiodergic interneuronal inhibition (or neural "repression" - the 'big
> brother' of
> GABAergic "habituation").
>> Broadly brain scientifically informed and *inEPTly AEVASIVE* people
> will typically fail to see the insidious AEVASIVE relevance of:
>> 1. repression-augmenting CURSES (primal pain) containing/deflecting
> automatic simple reflexes [like yawning, sneezing, ticks
> (simplest symptoms of Tourette's spectrum), itching (or worse,
> psychosomatized to "psoriasis")];
>> 2. that we because of having been in at least one situation that was
> anything from
> slowly to rapidly traumatizing (IOW have endured environmental influences
> that can be defined as a selective/synaptic hibernation imploring/inducing
> type stressor - or a SHITS) we tend to automatically learn more or less
> sophisticated and from socially approved to criminal addictive
> preoccupations
> (i.e. any behavior that via the effects of opioidergic and GABAergic
> inhibition
> between functionally and adaptively mutally incompatible actention modules)
> that "ambiadvantageously" preempts a potentially self-defeating
> cognitive-affective awareness of (preempt a paying of "actention" to)
> past (such) predicaments dynamically stored as CURSES.
>> P
