Loading...
Blast-related traumatic brain injury (TBI), common among U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, can be accompanied by pain, behavioral and cognitive deficits, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some people argue that impairments due to mild TBI in combat veterans do not typically persist and that lingering cognitive and behavioral problems are due to PTSD (Journal Watch Neurology Apr 8 2008).
To determine whether blast-related TBI causes axonal injury, researchers studied 63 U.S. male military personnel who had a clinical diagnosis of mild TBI and 21 controls who had been exposed to blasts but did not receive a TBI diagnosis. Patients were scanned with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a type of magnetic resonance imaging, wi…