Blast-Related Injuries Detected IN The Brains Of U.S. Military Personnel

Scientists from Washington University School of Medicine and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany, are using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to study soldiers diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury after exposure to a blast.

Neuroscientists at Washington University used DTI to reveal that some U.S. military personnel with mild blast-related traumatic brain injuries have abnormalities in the brain’s white matter that have not been seen with other types of imaging.

The scientists reported their findings in the June 2, 2011, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

An evaluation of 84 U.S. military personnel evacuated to Landstuhl from Iraq and Afghanistan after exposure to many types of explosive blasts found abnormalities in 18 of 63 patients diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury, but not among 21 injured in other ways.

Traumatic brain injuries are estimated to have affected as many as 320,000 military personnel in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The significance of the abnormalities seen in the military service personnel is not yet fully understood, says senior author David Brody, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology at Washington University.

Researchers have used DTI to study mild civilian brain injuries previously. This study’s results suggest that there may be fundamental differences between blast-related traumatic brain injuries and the sorts of mild traumatic brain injuries sustained by civilians.

The collaborative study team included Washington University neurology researcher Christine Mac Donald, PhD, who lived at Landstuhl for five and a half months to work on the study; Col. Stephen Flaherty, MD (now retired); and Lt. Col. Raymond Fang, MD, of the military medical staff at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

Funding from the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) supported this research