Mild Brain Injury

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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been considered as a signature injury of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of particular importance is the concept of mild TBI, wherein the brain injury is associated with transient alteration of consciousness. Mild TBI also represent a major public health issue with an incidence of 100-300/100,000 per year of hospitalizations. Recent attention has been focussed on the psychiatric health problems, particularly posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following TBI. Numerous studies have identified a strong association between TBI and subsequent PTSD. However, the relation of the severity of TBI with other neuropsychological sequelae (depression, anxiety disorders and suicidal ideation) has been unexplored. To answer these…show more content…
and then 3 months and 9 months later. Mild TBI was defined in the survey as a spectrum of TBI that included very mild (alteration but without loss of consciousness), mild (loss of consciousness or lapse of memory for less than 30 mins), and more-than-mild (loss of consciousness or lapse of memory lasting 30 minutes or less) TBI. The soldiers completed a computerized version of the DSM-IV mental disorders screening scales before and at 3 and 9 months after deployment to assess for the presence of psychiatric disorders. The results of the survey showed that approximately one in five soldiers reported exposure to mild (18%) or more-than-mild (1.2%) TBI(s) during the index deployment. Deployment-acquired TBI was found to be associated with elevated adjusted odds of PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder at 3 and 9 months in a dose-response fashion after adjusting for other risk factors (e.g., predeployment mental health status, severity of deployment stress, prior TBI history). However, deployment-acquired TBI was not associated with depression and
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