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Essay On Traumatic Brain Injury

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Fifteen years ago, if you believed that injuries to the brain recuperate similarly to other typical injuries, no one would question you. Today, if you believed that your brain had the ability to fully recover from a concussion, you would be in the vast majority of individuals uneducated on this topic. However, in more recent years, researchers have found that the structure and the way the brain functions can be permanently affected by a traumatic brain injury. Although the brain's ability to repair itself through brain plasticity compensates for the minor damages, more severe damages are not as simple, and are often unable to return to the previous uninjured state. Significant collisions can result in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, in addition …show more content…
A TBI, by definition, is a “blow or jolt to the head or a penetrating head injury that disrupts the normal function of the brain” (1). According to the CPSC, in 2009, there were approximately 446,788 sports related head injuries; this number has drastically increased as years have passed by. During this same year, cycling had the highest number of head injuries among sports, at 85,389, followed by football at 46,948 (1). Although cycling has an astonishingly high amount of head injuries, I narrowed my focus on football for the purpose of this paper, being the contact sport with the highest number of head related injuries. Having ten years of experience playing the sport, I know many individuals who have suffered TBIs while playing football, including myself. The most notorious TBI in the sport of football is the concussion, “a serious injury to the brain resulting from the rapid acceleration or deceleration of brain tissue within the skull” (7). This violent jolt of the head causes the brain and the cells that it consists of to stretch, compress, and tear, severely damaging them. Consequently, these cells can no longer function or communicate properly. The way in which they react and utilize chemicals changes (7) Although it is known that concussions cause severe damage to the brain, the extent of this damage, and the long term effects, are often

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