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.
Traumatic brain injury modeling
While modeling itself only gives estimations, research based on these estimations could give rise to amazing technology. For example, a human head and combat helmet were modeled under blast waves, and the results showed that the helmet did very little to stop blast-induced damage. With this information, a new type of combat helmet could be created that minimizes the damage that blast waves can cause. This technology could then also be applied to general armor, or even clothing (blast waves damage internal organs as well). This kind of advancement is only the beginning of TBI reduction. Methods such as genetic manipulation may also become available in the future that could increase the stress and strain thresholds for neurons, or perhaps methods for healing the brain altogether will be created based on the modeling done in the present.