Articles Posted in Medical Breakthroughs

A discovery has recently been made in the treatment of brain injuries.

In an article recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, titled “Treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury with Hypothermia”, researchers have found that mild hypothermia (cold temperature) can be beneficial when applied to victims of traumatic brain injury.

In a traumatic brain injury, the brain swells and thus exacerbates the injury. When mild hypothermia is applied, however, the outcome is similar to that of an iced black eye; the swelling is diminished, and the injury heals faster and better.

Brain surgery is no small matter, especially when the person undergoing the surgery is awake during the process. Brain surgery can be a scary thing — as a Personal Injury Law Office in Sacramento, we know the threat that a brain surgery poses on an individual and how fearful one gets when coming face to face with doctors’ hands inside of their head. Not so for John James, an Australian great-grandfather. This brave man went through a brain surgery talking to nurses, and says he wasn’t frightened at all during the surgery, but rather quite confident.

John first went to the hospital because he was having blurred vision and dizzy spells. The doctors found that he had a brain aneurysm behind his right eye that threatened to kill him. They decided to do a surgery to drain the aneurysm, but wanted to keep John awake to make sure they didn’t blind him in the process.

The doctors drilled a half-inch hole in John’s skull and used a type of reality software to create a 3-D image of his brain, which projected onto one side of an eyepiece the head doctor wore. On the other side of his eyepiece, a microscopic view of the brain was used to do the operation. During the entire operation, nurses showed John flashcards, ensuring that his vision was not being affected.

At our Personal Injury Law Firm in Sacramento, California, our clients that have suffered from brain injuries can testify to the “invisible disability” that affects their lives. A brain injury has been often termed as an “invisible disability” because it is usually not openly obvious that the victim is suffering. This invisible quality also makes it hard to immediately detect a less serious brain injury in an individual. As I have discussed before, brain injuries can often times go unnoticed at the time of the accident, causing more serious results to occur because of lack of treatment. Therefore, I can not stress this enough, it’s of primal importance to seek medical assistance for a victim of brain injury. It may save one’s life.

A new hand-held device has recently come out, however, that is supposed to be able to detect even minor brain injury after an accident. The device is called BrainScope and translates brain electrical activity (called EEG tracings) onto a graph into quantitative numbers (QEEGs). These QEEGs are then compared to a database of about 20,000 patients and can point out any deviations from the norm of this group.

BrainScope, which is roughly the size of an IPod, is supposed to be able to detect any deviations within minutes and, using a color display, indicates if the injured person’s brain functions are normal.