Category Archives: Brain Injury Treatment

A vulnerable brain injury victim was left barricaded in his room with no access to water by an 'understaffed' hospital. The family of Bill Douglas is demanding answers after finding a plank of wood jammed against his door and a trolley barring his exit when they called to visit. The 59-year-old has been in Glasgows Victoria Infirmary for four months, reports the Daily Record. His sister Morag Douglas, 55, fears Bill has been locked up because of a lack of specialist nurses. Hospital chiefs say the move was to protect him and others because there were issues with violent behaviour. Last night, national brain injury association Headway called for an urgent investigation into the case, saying Bills treatment was shocking, dangerous and highly inappropriate. Morag said when she got past the makeshift barricade on Friday night, she found no staff looking after Bill. VIEW GALLERY There were numerous signs on the wall, saying: Bill, you are in hospital. You had a bad fall and hit your head. Former police mechanic Bill, from Rutherglen, near Glasgow, also had no access to water because he had flooded his room previously while in a confused state. See more here: 'Dangerous and inappropriate': Brain … Continue reading →

Insteadof walking away feeling better after going to the doctor, increasing numbers of patients are lodging compo claims for treatment injuries. ACC figures show the number of people making claims as a result of botched surgeries, missed diagnosis and other complications is rising and is costing taxpayers millions of dollars a year. In the past five years, the number of new claims for treatment injuries has risen each year, adding about $30 million to the total cost of ACC payouts for such injuries. Capital & Coast District Health Board paid out $687,876 last year for a single treatment injury claim, the second highest behind one in Waikato of $699,249. The payouts - from public and private hospitals, general practices, physiotherapy clinics and other treatment places - could cover compensation for weekly earnings, a lump sum or death benefit along with the initial treatment from a hospital and ongoing treatment or rehabilitation. ACC would not give details of the biggest Capital & Coast payout, but spokeswoman Stephanie Melville said examples of injuries for which payouts were made in the past year included cerebral haemorrhage, oxygen depletion to the brain, Kernicterus - brain damage in newborns - and arachnoiditis - the inflammation … Continue reading →

2 hours ago A polyethylene glycol-hydrophilic carbon cluster developed at Rice University has the potential to quench the overexpression of damaging superoxides through the catalytic turnover of reactive oxygen species that can harm biological functions. Credit: Errol Samuel/Rice University Injectable nanoparticles that could protect an injured person from further damage due to oxidative stress have proven to be astoundingly effective in tests to study their mechanism. Scientists at Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School designed methods to validate their 2012 discovery that combined polyethylene glycol-hydrophilic carbon clustersknown as PEG-HCCscould quickly stem the process of overoxidation that can cause damage in the minutes and hours after an injury. The tests revealed a single nanoparticle can quickly catalyze the neutralization of thousands of damaging reactive oxygen species molecules that are overexpressed by the body's cells in response to an injury and turn the molecules into oxygen. These reactive species can damage cells and cause mutations, but PEG-HCCs appear to have an enormous capacity to turn them into less-reactive substances. The researchers hope an injection of PEG-HCCs as soon as possible after an injury, such as traumatic brain injury or … Continue reading →

Jerusalem, Feb 9: A naturally occurring peptide may lead to drug therapies for traumatic brain injury, stroke and heart attack, scientists say. Strokes, heart attacks and traumatic brain injuries are separate diseases with certain shared pathologies that achieve a common end cell death and human injury due to hypoxia, or lack of oxygen. In these diseases, a lack of blood supply to affected tissues begins a signalling pathway that ultimately halts the production of energy-releasing ATP molecules a death sentence for most cells. By employing derivatives of humanin, a naturally occurring peptide encoded in the genome of cellular mitochondria, researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, are working to interrupt this process, buying precious time for tissues whose cellular mechanisms have called it quits. The present findings could provide a new lead compound for the development of drug therapies for necrosis-related diseases such as traumatic brain injury, stroke and myocardial infarction conditions for which no effective drug-based treatments are currently available [that work by blocking necrosis], said Abraham Parola, a professor of biophysical chemistry at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. The humanin derivatives work by counteracting the decrease in ATP levels caused by necrosis. The … Continue reading →

Contact Information Available for logged-in reporters only Newswise Hot on the heels of discovering a protective form of immune response to spinal cord injury, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have pinpointed the biological trigger for that response a vital step toward being able to harness the bodys defenses to improve treatment for spine injuries, brain trauma, Alzheimers disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. Sounding the Alarm The trigger for the immune response, the molecule interleukin-33, is concentrated in what is known as white matter in the healthy brain and spinal cord. Interleukin-33, the researchers have discovered, is released upon injury and activates cells called glia, beginning the bodys protective response and promoting recovery. Its the first thing that tells the immune system that somethings been damaged, explained UVAs Sachin Gadani, the lead author of a new paper outlining the discovery. Its how the immune system initially knows to respond. The researchers arent sure if interleukin-33 has other roles to play in addition to its role in injury response. Interleukin-33 must be important to the central nervous system. It is expressed all the time even in the healthy state and weve only described its activity after injury, said … Continue reading →

Contact Information Available for logged-in reporters only Newswise ANN ARBOR, Mich. A tragic accident 32 years ago forever altered the lives of an entire prominent Michigan auto industry family, as a beloved wife and mother suffered a devastating traumatic brain injury, or TBI. Now, the Massey family has invested in the hope that University of Michigan medical and scientific teams can spare other families what they endured. With a significant gift from the Joyce and Don Massey Family Foundation, the U-M Health System has launched a major initiative to find new ways to treat TBI, and to care for and support those affected by it. To recognize their generosity, UMHS has named a new emergency treatment area in their honor. When it opens later this month, it will give patients who have suffered a TBI, stroke, major trauma or other critical illness or injury the most advanced care possible in the first crucial hours of their crisis. Located within the adult emergency department in University Hospital, the Joyce and Don Massey Family Foundation Emergency Critical Care Center, or EC3, will be among the first of its kind in the United States. Every time a patient with a serious TBI enters … Continue reading →

Contact Information Available for logged-in reporters only Newswise In the first study of its kind, a consortium led by UCLA physicians found that paramedics can start medications for patients in the first minutes after onset of a stroke. While the specific drug tested, magnesium sulfate, did not improve patient outcomes, the research has resulted in a new method to get promising treatments to stroke patients quickly. The study found that, by working with paramedics in the field, intravenous medications can be given to stroke patients within the golden hour, the window in which patients have the best chance to survive and avoid debilitating, long-term neurological damage. That finding is a game changer, said study co-principal investigator Dr. Jeffrey Saver, director of the UCLA Stroke Center and professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The trial succeeded in its goal of devising a means to deliver promising drugs to stroke patients in the first minutes, when theres the greatest amount of brain to save. We have opened a new therapeutic window that is now being used to test other compounds and deliver clot-busting drugs to patients in the field, Saver said. Stroke is a true emergency … Continue reading →

Paratrooper Ben Parkinson, who lost both legs aged just 22, meets Princess Anne The course of treatment depends on the individual patient, explains Prof James. It can be extremely arduous and is no quick fix. Ben will probably have 20 one-hour sessions over the next month and then be reviewed. Prof James, 73, emeritus professor of hyperbaric medicine at the University of Dundee, is one of the UKs foremost experts in the subject, having spent most of his professional life involved in deep sea diving, where high levels of oxygen are routinely used for brain and spinal cord injuries. His book, Oxygen and the Brain, which took him 20 years to write, was published at the end of last year . He passionately believes that hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), still regarded with suspicion by much of the medical establishment, can be used to improve the treatment of a range of disorders, from traumatic brain injury like Bens to multiple sclerosis (MS). Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is still regarded as quackery by many doctors because it is not taught in our medical schools he says. But it is simply a means of giving more of the oxygen we all breathe. We need … Continue reading →

Skull fractures can lead to an early death, even if the victims initially survived the injuries, according to a new study that looked at skulls from three Danish cemeteries with funeral plots dating from the 12th to the 17th centuries. This is the first time that researchers have used historical skulls to estimate the risk of early death among men who survived skull fractures, experts said. The study showed that these men were 6.2 times more likely to die an early death compared with men living during that time without skull fractures. Today, the risk of dying after getting a traumatic brain injury is about half that, likely because of improvements in modern medicine and social support, according to the researchers. "Their treatment then would have been pretty much go home, lie down and hope for the best," said study researcher George Milner, a professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. "There was very little that could be done at that time." [Inside the Brain: A Photo Journey Through Time] Often, epidemiology the study of disease incidence and prevalence among large populations is confined to living samples. But the researchers suggest that skull fractures, much like high blood pressure or … Continue reading →

Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) IMAGE:Dr. Dennis Kim, an LA BioMed lead researcher, is the author of a study that found a common treatment for traumatic brain injuries, platelet transfusions and DDAVP, were ineffective in... view more Credit: LA BioMed LOS ANGELES - (Jan. 27, 2015) - More than 1.7 million people in the U.S. alone suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI) every year, often resulting in permanent disabilities or death. Up to half of these patients will experience progression of bleeding inside or around the brain, the occurrence of which is associated with an increased risk of death. A common treatment to prevent progression of "traumatic intracranial hemorrhage" is the transfusion of platelets, which are irregular shaped cells that cause blood to clot, and the administration of desmopressin (DDAVP), a naturally occurring hormone used to treat bleeding and a number of other medical conditions. A new study from Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) researchers, published online ahead of print in the Journal of Neurotrauma, finds this treatment is not effective in preventing further bleeding in the brain or in reducing the risk of death for patients with TBI. "Previous studies of … Continue reading →