Concussion Flashcards
What does SRC stand for?
Sport related concussion
Sport related concussion is classified as what type of traumatic brain injury?
Mild
Symptoms and signs of an SRC may present _
Immediately, or evolve over minutes or hours, and commonly resolve within days, but may be prolonged
Clinical symptoms and signs can be variable, which sign did people believe you had to exhibit to have a concussion that is false?
Losing consciousness
What are the three subsets of clinical presentation in sports related concussions?
Symptoms, cognitive deficits, motor deficits
Describe the symptom category of concussion clinical presentation
what the person experiences from a subjective perspective (can’t measure this)
Physical, mental, emotional
Physical (ex. Headache)
Mental (ex. Brain fog)
Emotional (irritability, sadness, anxiety)
Describe the 3 main cognitive deficits in concussions
Orientation, memory and concentration
Orientation (dizziness, aka where am I in space)
Memory (doesn’t remember details)
Concentration (reduced ability to perform tasks because they have hard time with focus)
Describe the 2 components of motor deficits in concussions
- coordination and balance (unsteady, which may relate to dizziness)
- Can compare coordination with usual normal, people don’t always have trouble just walking
What tool is typically used to assess symptoms of a concussion? How long does it take to do and when would you do it?
SCAT6
Sport concussion assessment tool
- Around 15 minutes, done in the first week of injury otherwise it loses some validity.
The brain is a tethered organ what is the anchored to?
Spinal cord
Aside from being anchored to the spinal cord, what other structural properties does the brain have?
- texture like a nearly ripe avocado
- hangs out in cerebrospinal fluid (around 1/2 cup or 4 oz), roughly the consistency of water and protective but not too deep
- high water content ~75%
The brain has a high water content: what does this mean mechanically? Does the water level ever change?
Water impacts compressibility, can’t squish brain very easily because of high water content
- Since Breanne doesn’t compress very easily, you don’t just hit the brain and get a bruise (more severe TBI)
- HYDRATION LEVEL CHANGES THROUGHOUT LIFE
What is the grey matter and where is it located?
Cell bodies
On outside of brain mostly, some right near center
What is the white matter and where is it located?
Myelinated axons, mostly on inside
What is the mechanism of injury of concussions?
- external force applied in diff ways
1. Moving object strikes head
2. Your head strikes something that is stationary
3. No context with the head, external force is applied to some part of body, head ACCELERATES and then DECELERATES (ex.car accident, whiplash)
What is im common between all the MOI of concussion?
Some mechanical energy is transferred to brain and brain fails in absorbing it
Describe what happens when you accelerate/decelerate head
Head whipping around axis of rotation
- specifically leads to angular acceleration of the brain inside the skull
What 2 examples did Krista use to understand angular acceleration of the head/concussion MOI
Tennis ball in sock, a couple is cell body and axon, ball is brain
* AXON STRETCHES with angular acceleration
Brain as jello cheesecake, cell bodies are jello, axons and white matter are stiffer cheesecake, inner brain is graham crust ** diff densities in brain react differently
In concussion, structural distortion leads to
Functional issues/disturbance, manifests in metabolic things
What happens when axons are stretched? (1 word)
Mechanoporation
Mechanoporation leads to
Ion balance disruption
Description mechanoporation it in detail
- opens up channels through which ions travel through
- when you take channels that allow for transport and you stretch them, you open up gates and increase their opening size = interrupts tightly controlled system
- get large flow of sodium and calcium into cell, and large flow of potassium out
- homeostasis out of balance, nerves will want to restore it (pumps need a lot of atp to do this though)
= ELEVATED ENERGY DEMAND
What effect does calcium influx have on the mitochondria?
- calcium blocks/impairs its ability to create energy
= Primary energy mechanism doesn’t work - we want a lot of oxidative process and energy generation at mitochondria, now there is a shift to anaerobic system
Why is a shift to anaerobic in the brain a bad thing?
- if you rely on anaerobic glycolysis you need glucose from blood flow
- cerebral blood flow is greatly reduced following a concussion so you feed system effectively
How does the time to clinical recovery symptom wise differ from physiological recovery of concussion?
People tend to still have physiological impact that outlasts symptom recovery