The Hill News

Every day it seems we hear about someone having a concussionâ€"â€"whether a service member in Afghanistan, a professional athlete or a child from our neighborhood. A concussion is a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI), which is any damage to the brain, temporary or permanent, caused by an external force.  Health care professionals used to reserve the term “concussion” for those TBI’s that were expected to have only temporary effects, while “TBI” was used when effects were expected to be long lasting.  This informal convention was based on concussion being a mild TBI, and not a moderate or severe one.  However, the accumulating research indicates that the lifelong impact of TBI’s, including concussions, is not just a factor of the initial severity of the injury.  Long-term effects are also a function of how old you are when the injury occurs, how many you have had before and how soon after your last TBI you experience another.  Thus, persisting effects can occur not only when a TBI is more serious, or when we have had too many of them, but also if we have had them too young, too old, or too close together.

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