Head Injury: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Treatment

Head Injury

Answer. The following are the clinical features of head injury:

• Unequal pupil size is potentially a sign of a serious brain injury.
• Symptoms are dependent on the type of traumatic brain injury (diffse or focal) and the part of the brain that is affcted.
• Unconsciousness tends to last longer for people with injuries on the left side of the rain than for those with injuries on the right.
• With mild traumatic brain injury, the patient may remain conscious or may lose consciousness for a few seconds or minutes.
• Other symptoms of mild traumatic brain injury include headache, vomiting, nausea, lack of motor coordination, dizziness, difficulty in balancing, lightheadedness, blurred vision or tired eyes,ringing in the ears, bad taste in the mouth, fatigue or lethargy, and changes in sleep pattrns.
• Cognitive and emotional symptoms include behavioral or mood changes, confusion, and trouble with memory, concentration, attntion, or thinking.
• A person with a moderate or severe traumatic brain injury may have a headache that does not go away, repeated vomiting or nausea, convulsions, an inability to awaken, dilation of one or both pupils, slurred speech, aphasia (word-finding difficulties), dysarthria (muscle weakness that causes disordered speech), weakness or numbness in the limbs, loss of coordination, confusion, restlessness, or agitation.
• Common long-term symptoms of moderate to severe traumatic brain injury are changes in appropriate social behavior, deficits in social judgment, and cognitive changes, especially problems with sustained attention, processing speed, and executive functioning.
• Alexithymia, a deficiency in identifying,understanding, processing, and describing emotions occurs in 60.9% of individuals with traumatic brain injury.
• Cognitive and social deficits have long-term consequences for the daily lives of people with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury, but can be improved with appropriate rehabilitation.
• When the pressure within the skull (intracranial pressure) rises too high, it can be deadly.
  Signs of increased intracranial pressure include decreasing level of consciousness, paralysis or weakness on one side of the body, and a blown pupil, one that fails to constrict in response to light or is slow to do so.
• Cushing’s triad, a slow heart rate with high blood pressure and respiratory depression is a classic manifestation of significantly raised intracranial pressure.
• Anisocoria, unequal pupil size, is another sign of serious traumatic bone injury.
• Abnormal posturing, a characteristic positioning of the limbs caused by severe diffuse injury or high intracranial pressure, is an ominous sign