Thaindian News

Washington, Apr 29 (ANI): A study has found that stronger and tougher body armour may be just what soldiers need to better protect their brains from mild injuries tied to so-called “shell shock”.

The Johns Hopkins study found mild trauma, resulting from the initial shock of exploding mines, grenades and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) now accounts for more than 80 percent of all brain injuries among U.S. troops.

Some 160,000 American veteran men and women are estimated to have sustained this kind of trauma.

“Protecting the body is absolutely essential to protecting the brain,” senior study investigator and Johns Hopkins neuropathologist Vassilis Koliatsos, M.D., said.

“Blast-related injuries, including what we call blast-induced neurotrauma, are the signature medical events of current wars, and improvements to body armour in addition to helmet wearing are likely going to be needed if we want to minimize their threat to our soldiers’ health,” Koliatsos, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said.

Koliatsos and his team used a metal shock tube specially designed at Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory to isolate the effects of an explosion’s primary blast wave on mice.

Researchers found that a plastic glass covering around the torso of shocked mice fully protected them from any axonal nerve cell damage in critical parts of the brain responsible for body movement, including the cerebellum and the corticospinal tract, which links nerves in the brain to those in the spinal cord.

Body armour also shielded mice from over 80 percent of the axonal damage observed in the brain’s visual pathways when compared to mice wearing no body armour.

The study also found that wearing similarly secured plastic glass helmets conferred no greater protection from neurological damage from the initial, overpressure wave than in mice shocked without protective headgear.

Koliatsos emphasizes that these results do not undermine the need to wear a helmet to shield their head from flying shrapnel and other bomb debris and protect them from secondary blast waves, some of which are strong enough to throw bodies more than 100 feet.

The study is believed to be the first to show widespread axonal damage in the brain from mild blast explosions and was designed specifically to investigate the ill effects on the body of the primary blast, of extremely fast-moving, high-pressure air, researchers said.

“Axons can be quite elastic, and they can expand, slowly, but we suspect that if they stretch too quickly, they will suffer damage or even break,” Koliatsos said.In unshielded mice, researchers found that the lungs were the chest organ most likely to be marred by a blast wave, but the absence of any respiratory injury did not mean the brain was safeguarded, with brain injuries evident in both lung-damaged and lung-undamaged mice.

“Our results should put military physicians in the field on notice that they need to really closely monitor veterans for mild traumatic brain injuries even in the absence of any lung injury,” Koliatsos said.

“Regardless of what you call it — shell shock, mild traumatic brain injury, or mild traumatic brain injury combined with post-traumatic stress disorder - it may hide a serious neurological condition,” he added.

The findings will be published in the May edition of the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology. (ANI)