Brain injury

Almost half of homeless men had traumatic brain injury

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Almost half of all homeless men who took part in a study by St. Michael’s Hospital had suffered at least one traumatic brain injury in their life and 87 per cent of those injuries occurred before the men lost their homes.

While assaults were a major cause of those traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, (60 per cent) many were caused by potentially non-violent mechanisms such as sports and recreation (44 per cent) and motor vehicle collisions and falls (42 per cent).

The study, led by Dr. Jane Topolovec-Vranic, a clinical researcher in the hospital’s Neuroscience Research Program, was published today in the journal CMAJ Open.

Dr. Topolovec-Vranic said it’s important for health care providers and others who work with homeless people to be aware of any history of TBI because of the links between such injuries and mental health issues, substance abuse, seizures and general poorer physical health.
The fact that so many homeless men suffered a TBI before losing their home suggests such injuries could be a risk factor for becoming homeless, she said. That makes it even more important to monitor young people who suffer TBIs such as concussions for health and behavioural changes, she said.

Dr. Topolovec-Vranic looked at data on 111 homeless men aged 27 to 81 years old who were recruited from a downtown Toronto men’s shelter. She found that 45 per cent of these men had experienced a traumatic brain injury, and of these, 70 per cent were injured during childhood or teenage years and 87 per cent experienced an injury before becoming homeless.

In men under age 40, falls from drug/alcohol blackouts were the most common cause of traumatic brain injury while assault was the most common in men over 40 years old.

Recognition that a TBI sustained in childhood or early teenage years could predispose someone to homelessness may challenge some assumptions that homelessness is a conscious choice made by these individuals, or just the result of their addictions or mental illness, said Dr. Topolovec-Vranic.
This study received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation.

Separately, a recent study by Dr. Stephen Hwang of the hospital’s Centre for Research on Inner City Health, found the number of people who are homeless or vulnerably housed and who have also suffered a TBI may be as high as 61 per cent — seven times higher than the general population.
Dr. Hwang’s study, published in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, is one of the largest studies to date investigating TBI in homeless populations. The findings come from the Health and Housing in Transition Study, which tracks the health and housing status of homeless and vulnerably housed people in Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa.

source: Science daily

Biosensor to detect brain injuries during heart surgery

 

Scientists have developed a fingernail-sized biosensor that could alert doctors when serious brain injury occurs during heart surgery.

Johns Hopkins engineers and cardiology experts teamed up to develop the device and demonstrated in lab tests that the prototype sensor had successfully detected a protein associated with brain injuries.

“Ideally, the testing would happen while the surgery is going on, by placing just a drop of the patient’s blood on the sensor, which could activate a sound, light or numeric display if the protein is present,” said the study’s senior author, Howard E Katz, a Whiting School of Engineering expert in organic thin film transistors, which form the basis of the biosensor.

The project originated about two years ago when Katz, who chairs the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was contacted by Allen D Everett, a Johns Hopkins Children’s Center pediatric cardiologist who studies biomarkers linked to pulmonary hypertension and brain injury.

Everett sought an engineer to design a biosensor that responds to glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), which is a biomarker linked to brain injuries.

“If we can be alerted when the injury is occurring then we should be able to develop better therapies. We could improve our control of blood pressure or redesign our cardiopulmonary bypass machines,” Everett said.

“We could learn how to optimise cooling and rewarming procedures and have a benchmark for developing and testing new protective medications,” Everett added.

At present, Everett said, doctors have to wait years for some brain injury-related symptoms to appear. That slows down the process of finding out whether new procedures or treatments to reduce brain injuries are effective.

“The sensor platform is very rapid. It’s practically instantaneous,” Everett said.

To create this sensor, Katz turned to an organic thin film transistor design.

The sensing area is a small square, 3/8ths-of-an-inch on each side. On the surface of the sensor is a layer of antibodies that attract GFAP, the target protein.

When this occurs, it changes the physics of other material layers within the sensor, altering the amount of electrical current that is passing through the device.

These electrical changes can be monitored, enabling the user to know when GFAP is present.

“This sensor proved to be extremely sensitive. It recognised GFAP even when there were many other protein molecules nearby. As far as we’ve been able to determine, this is the most sensitive protein detector based on organic thin film transistors,” Katz said.

The study was published in the journal Chemical Science.

Source:  Zee News