Traumatic brain injury occurs when the brain is violently hit by some object or when some object pierces into the scalp resulting into damage to the brain tissue. This kind of sudden trauma results in damage to the brain tissue. In such a complicated structure like brain, this damage takes little time to reach other parts of the brain than where the injury first began.

The types of Traumatic Brain Injury:

Traumatic head injury is either closed head injury (wherein there is no break of the scalp and no open wound is visible), penetrating injury (wherein a foreign object enters into the brain and damages the brain tissue) or crushing injuries (wherein the head is mostly caught between two objects such as road and a motor vehicle) & can further be divided into mild, moderate or severe traumatic brain injury:

€ Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: A injury can be classified as mild traumatic brain injury when the unconsciousness &/or disorientation is for a duration of 30 minutes or less. It's also known as minor TBI and is believed to be mild but the after effects can be devastating for the patient and family.

€ Moderate Brain Injury: A person with moderate injury usually experiences unconsciousness for around 15 minutes to 6 hours or most probably a day of post-traumatic amnesia. Such patients are more likely to show a number of residual physical, cognitive and emotional & behavioural effects.

€ Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: Severe TBI is usually said to be when the patient remains in loss of consciousness for a duration of 6 hours or more, or on a post traumatic amnesia of a day or more. The extent of physical effects on the patient depends on the length of coma they remain in.

The Effects of Traumatic Brain Injury:

TBI causes a number of hidden/latent disabilities like a noticeable change in the patient's personality, thinking and memory, long-term issues in proper usage of sensory vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch, severe headaches and the like for which rehabilitation treatments are provided in best neurosurgery hospitals. However, the most perceptible and distinct signs of a traumatic head injury are coma, loss of power or immovability of limbs and speech impairment:

€ Coma: Coma is the state of depressed consciousness which is due to damage to the nerve fibres in central part of brain and keeps the patient unresponsive to the outside world as an after effect of moderate to severe TBI. A coma can last for a few seconds to a few weeks whereas a persistent vegetative state for more than a year.

€ Loss of power in Limbs: There is a link between the damage to a particular side of the brain and the corresponding lack of function in brain. The damage to parietal lobes in the left side of the brain results in weakness in the limbs on the right side of the body, and the other way round.

€ Speech/language impairment: Pertaining to this particular link of damage to dysfunction due to Severe injury, any severe injury to the left side of the brain (the brain stem) results in causing impairment of speech and/or language.