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Scientists are making progress toward a quick test to gauge head-injury severity.
Colleagues,
As reported in MIT Tech Review ... Currently, no blood tests are approved as a way to diagnose brain injury in the United States. In the case of mild head injuries or more serious ones that take time to develop, it's difficult to tell early on how severely a patient has been hurt and whether she will suffer long-term consequences.
...One of the most challenging situations for physicians is deciding how to deal with patients who come into the emergency room with mild traumatic brain injury or concussion. Those with telltale symptoms such as dizziness and nausea will be given a computed axial tomography (CT) scan to look for signs of bleeding in the brain; patients who do show bleeding will need further monitoring and sometimes surgery. But because it's difficult to determine who needs the scan, many patients get it unnecessarily, and others who do need it may be sent home.
Scientists hope that a blood test to detect proteins and other molecules released into the blood after brain injury could help. But developing such tests has been a challenge. "It's very hard, because not every head injury is the same," says David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles...
One blood test already used in Europe to screen head-trauma patients before CT scans detects a protein called S100B, which is released by astrocyte cells in the brain after injury...
Read on at: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22409/?nlid=1936
As reported in MIT Tech Review ... Currently, no blood tests are approved as a way to diagnose brain injury in the United States. In the case of mild head injuries or more serious ones that take time to develop, it's difficult to tell early on how severely a patient has been hurt and whether she will suffer long-term consequences.
...One of the most challenging situations for physicians is deciding how to deal with patients who come into the emergency room with mild traumatic brain injury or concussion. Those with telltale symptoms such as dizziness and nausea will be given a computed axial tomography (CT) scan to look for signs of bleeding in the brain; patients who do show bleeding will need further monitoring and sometimes surgery. But because it's difficult to determine who needs the scan, many patients get it unnecessarily, and others who do need it may be sent home.
Scientists hope that a blood test to detect proteins and other molecules released into the blood after brain injury could help. But developing such tests has been a challenge. "It's very hard, because not every head injury is the same," says David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles...
One blood test already used in Europe to screen head-trauma patients before CT scans detects a protein called S100B, which is released by astrocyte cells in the brain after injury...
Read on at: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22409/?nlid=1936
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