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| Discover Magazine Article on IED Brain Injuries |
| 2007-03-02 |
| In a flash, the blast incinerates air, sprays metal, burns flesh. Milliseconds after an improvised explosive device (IED) detonates, a blink after a mortar shell blows, an overpressurization wave engulfs the human body, and just as quickly, an underpressure wave follows and vanishes. Eardrums burst, bubbles appear in the bloodstream, the heart slows. A soldier — or a civilian — can survive the blast without a single penetrating wound and still receive the worst diagnosis: traumatic brain injury, or TBI, the signature injury of the Iraq War. But in the same instant that the blast unleashes chaos, it also activates the most organized and sophisticated trauma care in history. Within a matter of hours, a soldier can be medevaced to a state-of-the-art field hospital, placed on a flying intensive care unit, and receive continuous critical care a sea away. (During Vietnam, it took an average of 15 days to receive that level of treatment. Today the military can deliver it in 13 hours.) Heroic measures may be yielding unprecedented survival rates, but they also carry a grim consequence: No other war has created so many seriously disabled veterans. Soldiers are surviving some brain injuries with only their brain stems unimpaired. Long Discover Magazine article, very interesting, pretty fair. Several moving sub-stories about individuals, like the guy mentioned in the summation of the four types of blast injuries to the brain... Blast-related brain injuries like those sustained by Reyes can deliver multiple TBIs. First there is barotrauma, in which the body suffers the same magnitude of pressure felt deep underwater. It's theorized that portions of the brain swell and decompress almost instantly during this stage, causing a host of cellular defects throughout the brain. Objects like shrapnel and gravel penetrate the skull, ping-ponging within the cranium walls. The force of the blast then blows an individual against an object, like a wall or a roof, causing blunt trauma to the head. Finally, in response to these injuries, the brain releases a metabolic cascade of neurochemicals that have a toxic effect on brain tissue. Reyes had no penetrating fragments; he experienced three of the four blast insults. Go read the whole thing, or bookmark it and read it later... It'll probably take 10-20 minutes to read it. Some will need a tissue or two. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #2 The IEDs are particularly evil. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2007-03-02 16:55 |
| #1 Go read the whole thing, or bookmark it and read it later... It'll probably take 10-20 minutes to read it. Some will need a tissue or two. Thanks for the heads-up. Filed under "Read Back at Home After Work." |
| Posted by: xbalanke 2007-03-02 12:54 |