Suffered A Concussion After A Car Accident? You Need To Know These Things

Good morning. It's Attorney Ryan McKeen from Connecticut Trial Firm.
And I'm here to talk to you today a little bit about brain injuries. Brain injuries are very common after car accidents and it makes a lot of sense. Your brain moves about in the cranial cavity as your head moves forward, causing bruising and damage to the brain. And most of the time it results in a concussion and it concussion can really mean a lot of things that concussion is by definition a mild traumatic brain injury. And here's some things that you should know. First of all, you should know that roughly 50% of the time, and these are done, these are congressional studies studies by the department of defense. Concussive symptoms will resolve in, you know, three weeks, six weeks, three months, six months, and the person will be totally fine. But in the other half of the cases, there is lasting brain damage.
And one of the things that we always recommend to folks is that they take a River Mead test and a River Mead test is a simple questionnaire. It's probably about 15 to 20 questions. And what it really asks you to do is rate your baseline where you were before the accident to where you are now. And it rates a whole host of things because brain injuries aren't just injuries to our brain. They're injuries to our whole person. Our brain is our computer.
Our brain governs a whole host of functions. So we're brain injuries. They affect every system. Our reproductive systems, they affect our ability to sleep. They affect our mood, they affect our ability to think and analyze problems. They affect the whole brain and whole person. And they may have effects such as nausea that just aren't limited to the brain because we've damaged the computer inside inside the brain.
That is, that is running our, our bodies. So a River Mead test is very useful. You may want to take it and you may want to have somebody close to you, a spouse, a parent, a coworker, somebody who you trust, who sees you a lot because they may notice differences that you're unaware of. The test is free. It's well-established in the medical literature. I'm going to link to it down below in the comments and it'll at least give you you know, some idea as to what to look for now with brain injury cases. One of the other things that you know, you, you, we want to be looking for and concerned about is damage to the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland is a gland that governs a whole host of hormonal functions in your brain and it can have impacts on on, on your sexual health.
It can have impacts on your sleep. It can cause weight gain. Basically if your hormones are out of regulation, which can happen after a concussion after damage to the pituitary gland it could have a whole host of con, a whole host of consequences and you should discuss those freely with your doctor. If you have a lawyer, discuss them with your lawyer, discuss them with your spouse because you're not alone. Brain injuries can have very significant impacts and you want to get your pituitary gland tested. Perhaps talk to that, talked about that with your primary care, your neurologist. And and, and get to the bottom of it because there are effective treatments like hormone replacement therapy that can really help folks deal with problems of damage to their pituitary gland. You know, one of the other things that we want to talk about is that there are a whole host of imaging that can really document the injuries to your brain.
You know, x-rays and traditional MRIs do not capture all but the most severe injuries. But there are, you know, pet scans and DTIs and, and machines that can really, really see in granular detail the your brain and the physical impacts that it has that an injury has on the brain on a whole host of levels. So if you're experiencing ongoing symptoms, you're really going want to you know, press your neurologist or your primary care doctor to get more imaging so they can better understand what is going on and how to fix you. Because that's, that's really, that's really important. And you know, one of the other things that you're really going to want to want to know about a brain injury is that that Congress has done studies, department of defense has done studies, CDC has done studies, and I can link to them that most folks, they don't report a brain injury until weeks, months after it happens.
www.tbi-impact.org/cde/mod_tem...
Attorney Ryan McKeen
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