Sports-related traumatic brain injury
Rules exist within each sport to help prevent cerebral contusions and traumatic brain injuries. However, individual athletes are the best prevention against their own injuries. In a game, athletes notice when they have the symptoms of a cerebral contusion and should take themselves out of the game. It may be hard for medical personnel or coaches to notice when a player has a traumatic brain injury, so it is in the player’s best interest to be removed from play. In hockey, traumatic brain injuries constitute 10%-15% of all head injuries. With the high percent of injuries being traumatic, extensive design improvements have been made to helmets. These improvements reduce the risk of cerebral contusions by providing more padding around the skull and a chin strap that keeps the helmet snug. In baseball, major improvements to helmets have been made to protect batters from the impact a baseball can have when hitting their head. Helmets, before this major improvement, were designed to withstand a velocity of 70 mph from a pitch or foul ball. Since the company Rawlings’ new design, helmets can withstand a velocity of 100 mph and have further padding around the softer parts on the side of the skull.
Blunt trauma
Most patients with more severe traumatic brain injury have of a combination of intracranial injuries, which can include diffuse axonal injury, cerebral contusions, as well as intracranial bleeding, including subarachnoid hemorrhage, subdural hematoma, epidural hematoma, and intraparenchymal hemorrhage. The recovery of brain function following a traumatic accident is highly variable and depends upon the specific intracranial injuries that occur, however there is significant correlation between the severity of the initial insult as well as the level of neurologic function during the initial assessment and the level of lasting neurologic deficits. Initial treatment may be targeted at reducing the intracranial pressure if there is concern for swelling or bleeding within this skull, which may require surgery such as a hemicraniectomy in which part of the skull is removed.