Traumatic Brain Injury – Emergency Room

Transcript

“Sometimes we get a call from a loved one or a caregiver about a child or somebody in the household who has sustained a blow to the head and maybe acting a little strange. And they’re very concerned about them. They want to go to the emergency room and they want to know what is going to happen when we go to the emergency room. Well, first of all, if it is a more mild injury, most of those diagnoses of mild TBI are made on the basis of a history and a physical. It’s basically the physical exam where the doctor checks your vision, your balance, reflexes, and can send you on your way to be observed by the family member. However, if there are some more profound symptoms, or if someone has suffered a loss of consciousness, then they may have an MRI or a CT scan.

And those are both kind of the tube tests, the MRI, where your head will go in a tube and the CT scan where it’s a larger tube and more of your body goes in it. But it’s looking for structural changes, actual changes to the brain, which are notoriously negative. That is, most CT scans and MRIs are normal in a mild acute brain injury. In the very near future however, we are developing great blood tests so that we can tell within minutes, if someone has sustained a disruption of the chemicals in the brain. And you can also tell about how long ago this injury occurred, which is going to be very fascinating. There are also a working on a saliva test as well. So stay tuned. Pretty soon the diagnosis for an MTBI will become a lot easier and a lot more exact.”