Brain Injury

Staff members for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) have emerged as key advocates in a campaign to ensure the new health-care law guarantees more Americans who suffer traumatic brain injuries the high quality of care the congresswoman is receiving to recover from a January shooting. Earlier this month, Giffords's chief of staff, Pia Carusone, released a letter urging Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to make it a goal as she defines the minimum package of "essential benefits" the...

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — A private foundation broke ground Thursday at Fort Campbell on a new clinic to treat the signature wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries. The New York-based Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund promised last year to raise more than $100 million to build nine of these centers at military installations across the country. The Fort Campbell clinic, which is set to open in a year, will be the third clinic, with the...

For the past 23 months, Kevin Pearce's life has been like one of those sixth-grade evolutionary charts, the one that starts with the ape on the left side and gradually progresses into the human on the right. He started out, after the accident, flat on his back. Eventually, he was able to sit up. Then he was able to stand on his feet, then walk, then run. Unlike the ape-to-human evolution, Pearce's didn't take several ages to complete. It only felt that way. "It just feels like the never-ending journey,"...

PHOENIX — Arizona's Brandon McCarthy is taking medication and says he's confident he'll be fine after he collapsed at a restaurant with a seizure related to the head injury he sustained while pitching last September. The Diamondbacks' right-hander underwent extensive examinations at the Mayo Clinic after the incident Monday. He was having dinner with his wife at a Phoenix restaurant when he passed out. "It's something you get through," he said. "Now we know a little bit more about it. We know kind of how we'll...

WEDNESDAY, June 11 (HealthDay News) -- People with sleep apnea show tissue loss in brain regions that help store memory, a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) study shows. "Our findings demonstrate that impaired breathing during sleep can lead to serious brain injury that disrupts memory and thinking," principal investigator Ronald Harper, a professor of neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said in a prepared statement. People with sleep apnea stop breathing and awaken repeatedly during the night, leading...

TUESDAY, June 24 (HealthDay News) -- The Alzheimer's drug memantine (brand name Namenda) may help reduce a form of brain injury that affects many premature babies, according to a Children's Hospital Boston study. Hypoxic-ischemia, a compromise of the brain's blood and oxygen supply, can lead to cerebral palsy and cognitive/behavioral problems. In experiments with rats that had brain injury similar to that seen in some premature infants, the Children's Hospital team found memantine could reduce damage to cells called...

MONDAY, May 12 (HealthDay News) -- A new way of analyzing MRI data can detect a subtle but serious kind of brain injury and help determine how a patient may recover, say researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. This kind of injury, called diffuse axonal injury (DAI), occurs when the head suddenly stops moving, such as during a motor vehicle crash, and axons are damaged or deformed. Axons are long, thin extensions that reach from one area to another.

Welterweight boxer Oscar Diaz remains in critical but stable condition two days after collapsing during a fight, but the doctor who performed surgery on him said he should survive. David Jimenez said Diaz is still in a coma, but that is to be expected after a severe brain injury. "Overall, I think ultimately he should survive the injury and should recover," Jimenez said. But Jimenez said it's too early to tell whether the 25-year-old Diaz, who collapsed before the 11th round of the televised USBA welterweight...

MONDAY, June 23 (HealthDay News) -- In 2005, traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) due to falls resulted in nearly 8,000 deaths and 56,000 hospitalizations among Americans age 65 and older, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study. TBIs accounted for 50 percent of all unintentional fall deaths and 8 percent of nonfatal fall-related hospitalizations among older adults. As people age, their risk of falling increases due to a number of factors such as mobility problems due to muscle weakness or poor balance, loss of...

More than 5 million Americans have suffered a traumatic brain injury. A new Web site, brainline.org, offers these people and their families a user-friendly source of information. The site was created by public television and radio station WETA, with funding from the government's Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. Brainline offers such online tools as webcasting, videos, a Facebook page, font enlargement, a glossary that can pop up inside text and a one-click option that translates all text into Spanish.

Robert F. Dorr [" Honoring those who never return ," Free for All, June 1] wrote that Memorial Day is not the correct occasion to honor those who succumb to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after completing their military service. I respectfully disagree. We recently lost our son, Capt. Neil C. Landsberg, a highly decorated U.S. Air Force Special Operations combat controller who led small teams behind enemy lines on multiple deployments. Upon his return to the United States, he continued to serve by volunteering at Walter...

IN THE 4th century B.C., Aristotle argued that what separates humans from animals is our unique ability to reason. Some 2,300 years later, our best thinkers can tell us relatively little about how that reasoning takes place — how the brain operates normally, or what's happening when it behaves irregularly. President Obama announced this week that he wants to change that. The president proposed a down payment of $100 million to begin mapping the brain. In a video conference this week, National Institutes of Health Director...

Portraits Exhibit honors brain-injury survivors ‘Whack'ed,' National Museum of Health and Medicine Hemorrhages, blunt-force trauma and bullet wounds don't exactly scream "art. " But in a new exhibit , the National Museum of Health and Medicine is honoring men and women who survived such traumatic brain injuries (TBI). The temporary exhibit — titled "Whack'ed . . . and then everything was different" — expands on the museum's standing...

PHOENIX — Just before St. Louis Rams Coach Jeff Fisher stepped into a conference center at the plush Arizona Biltmore resort Wednesday to speak about a new player safety rule ratified by NFL team owners, he stood outside talking on his phone to Eddie George , his former running back with the Tennessee Titans. As a runner, George was known for his bruising style and, according to Fisher, he expressed concerns about the newly approved rule. The measure...

Sharing the Journey grief support group A monthly meeting that promotes healing for those grieving the recent death of a loved one. Thursday, 6-7:30 p.m. Chesapeake Life Center, 9500 Arena Dr. (Suite 250), Largo. 410-987-2129. www.chesapeakelifecenter.org . $10. Registration required. Women's open volleyball Non-competitive drop-in games. Friday, 11 a.m.-1:30 p.m. City of Bowie Gymnasium, 4100 Northview Dr. $2. Gym members free. Clinton blood drive Sponsored by Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

Hip-Hop Fitness Get fit or die tryin' "Formula 50" by 50 Cent Forget getting rich. Rapper 50 Cent — who became a household name in 2003 with the album "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " — is now interested in helping you get fit. The hip-hop star known as much for his abs as his rhymes has released a new book, sharing workout tips and advice for getting ripped. "Formula 50: A 6-Week Workout and Nutrition Plan That Will Transform Your Life" details workouts and...

THURSDAY, May 29 (HealthDay News) -- Stroke patients who suffer seizures are more likely to die within 30 days than stroke patients who don't have seizures are, a new study shows. Seizures may be a sign of significant brain injury and may occur in patients who've suffered any type of stroke. This study found that the overall incidence of seizures within 24 hours of a stroke is 3.1 percent. Patients with intracranial hemorrhages (bleeding within the brain) have a higher rate of seizures (8.4 percent)

Dr. Ayub Khan Ommaya, 78, a neurosurgeon, an internationally known expert on brain injuries and the inventor of a device that facilitates treatment of brain tumors, died July 10 at his home in Islamabad, Pakistan, of complications from Alzheimer's disease. The longtime Bethesda resident was a retired chief of neurosurgery at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and professor of neurosurgery at George Washington University. Before Dr. Ommaya's work in the 1960s, there was no effective...

Micaela Cornis-Pop National program manager, Polytrauma System of Care, Veterans Health Administration, Rehabilitation and Prosthetic Services, Department of Veterans Affairs Best known for: Cornis-Pop oversees more than 110 rehabilitation facilities around the country, helping the VA stay at the forefront of developments in treating traumatic brain injury and other medical issues facing veterans and military service members....