Terms like jumbo shrimp, boneless ribs, awfully pretty and cold sweat are considered oxymorons — words that contradict themselves.  Mild traumatic brain injuries are another of those terms.

If you take anything from our brain injury lawyer blog, make it to always treat a head injury as a serious injury.  Even though the term mild usually indicates a minor injury, scientific research has proven that mild traumatic brain injuries are not so mild after all.

Mild traumatic brain injuries are more commonly known as concussions.

Mild traumatic brain injury is a relatively new term that scientists are trying use instead of concussion.  Until very recently, concussions were not taken as seriously as health researchers would have liked, and maybe a newer, more serious term like mild traumatic brain injury could change that.  Time will tell, although one could argue that concussions are now finally getting taken seriously by professional sports — and thus filtering down to collegiate and high school athletics where more head injuries occur.

According to Science Daily, mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) affect over one million U.S. citizens each year.  Mild traumatic brain injuries often lead to continual neurological and cognitive problems for many people, commonly known as post-concussion syndrome.  There’s been a lot of talk in the news about how to save money on health care costs, and despite the new-found publicity for concussions, part of the problem could be how little is known about the adverse affects of mild traumatic brain injuries.

Science Daily talked a lot about one doctor in particular.  The doctor is the director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair and a professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and he has a team at the forefront of mild traumatic brain injury research.  His team uses a molecular mechanism and advanced neuroimaging techniques to collect data on human and animal studies on mTBI.

Their findings seem to indicate distinct changes in white matter in brains with mild traumatic brain injuries.  More specifically, the stretching and disconnecting the brain’s nerve cells after a concussion leads to problems in the sodium channels between cells.  Dr. Smith believes this is significant for the future of brain injury diagnosis.

“This is not inconsequential.  Indeed, the observation that brain pathology can detected after a concussion calls for much more extensive efforts to prevent, diagnose, and treat mild traumatic brain injury.”  — Director of Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Hopefully his research, as well as the research done by similar teams, will one day lead to a better scientific and medical understanding of mild traumatic brain injuries.  Our brain injury lawyers have blogged about how concussions have affected high profile professional athletes, but we cannot tell the story of the million or so other non-famous people that will suffer a mild traumatic brain injury in 2010.  So we wish this doctor and the rest of his team good luck.

After all, a concussion is not a minor injury, regardless of its oxymoron moniker, mild traumatic brain injury.

If you’ve suffered a head injury in a car accident that you didn’t cause, contact our bilingual San Diego law firm at 1-858-551-2090 for a FREE consultation with an experienced brain injury lawyer.  You may also click here and submit your case for a FREE online review.  We work on a contingency fee basis, which means you owe us nothing until we recover money on your behalf.