What happens when a patient is admitted to a trauma center with a traumatic brain injury (TBI)? Clinicians will first classify the injury as mild, moderate or severe, by assessing the patient’s consciousness levels. The differences in TBIs will vary greatly from the initial trauma and assessment to the resulting effects in the years that follow. The use of broad classifications for these injuries can be detrimental by limiting the predictability of the patient’s outcomes, both long-term and short-term. “Every traumatic brain injury is unique,” said Vignesh Subbian, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, or BME, and the Department of Systems and Industrial [...]

Vititoe Law Group founder Jim Vititoe has once again been named a top brain injury lawyer  by the National Trial Lawyers. This is the 2nd year in a row that Mr. Vititoe has received this recognition.    The National Trial Lawyers is a professional organization of America’s top trial lawyers. Membership in the organization is by invitation only and is extended to those individuals who exemplify superior qualifications, trial results, and leadership in their respective state or major geographical area. The National Trial Lawyers has evaluated Mr. Vititoe's qualifications and extended an exclusive invitation to him based on his performance as an exceptional trial lawyer. With more than [...]

Thanks to a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) brain injury study, scientists now have a real time window into how head injury affects thousands of individual cells and genes simultaneously in mice. This approach, reported in Nature Communication, and supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), could lead to precise treatments being developed for traumatic brain injury. “Instead of clustering responses according to categories of cells in TBI, we can now see how individual cells in those groups react to head injury,” said Patrick Bellgowan, Ph.D., program director at NINDS. UCLA professors, Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, Ph.D. and Xia Yang, Ph.D., and colleagues, [...]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has, for the first time, released specific guidelines for the treatment of young people with mild traumatic brain injuries, commonly referred to as concussions. An extensive review of the current research into mild traumatic brain injuries yielded the determination by a panel of experts as to the best practice based on the evidence. “It’s only recently that we started to have enough research to do this,” said Matt Gammons, the former president of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine in an interview with Popular Science. “For a long time, we didn’t know a whole lot about brain trauma [...]