Brain Injury In Sports

Between playing sports, being caught in an accidental collision, or just taking an unlucky fall the head can take some serious blows, and with that, the brain also can potentially sustain injuries. Few will come out of such problematic situations with no problems at all, while others might not emerge at all. What makes it so that certain brain injuries will allow people to recover, while others lead straight to death? There is a plethora of ideas and studies to find out the exact causes, but the leading factors are severity and location of the injury.

Brain injuries can occur when trauma is taken to the head, other than just external harm, such as cuts on the face. As listed in Traumatic Brain Injuries in the United States, a government publication,

Of the afore mentioned causes of brain injury, the cause with the highest mortality rate was other/unknown at 37.3%, and a close second was motor-vehicle accidents at 31.8% (Faul, 2010, p. 40). According to Traumatic Brain Injuries, “other” factors can be drawn from sports-related injuries, military blasts, gun wounds, and those of the like, which all have high levels of severity due to the force behind the injuries (Cifu, 2010, p. 16). The other given causes with lower mortality rates usually do not have severe damage with them that would be fatal, and are usually treated more

Some of the “most frequent causes of death” come from brainstem lesion extensions, which are usually attributed to migraines or headaches (Cifu, 2010, p. 110). While not completely a part of the brain, the ventral arteries are near the brainstem and leading up the brain, and the rupture of them “can be fatal,” according to Forensic Neuropathology and Associated Neurology, a book that covers almost every aspect of the brain’s diseases and ways to apply forensics to the brain (Oehmichen, 2006, p. 147). Keeping on the ventral path, when there is “massive bleeding in the ventricular system,” it is hard to treat and overcome, leading to death (Oehmichen, 2006, p. 159). Moving to the outer layers of the brain, when severity of an impact is high enough, subarachnoid hemorrhaging and intraventricular hemorrhaging can "often [cause] irreversible cardiac arrest” (Oehmichen, 2006, p. 141). The outermost layer of the brain, the duramater, also has a high probability of getting damaged and causing problems, which could lead to death, but they are much easier treated than the innermost