According to the Mayo Clinic, many complications can follow a traumatic brain injury (TBI), from recurring seizures to personality changes. In a recent study, researchers from Georgia Research University found that even mild TBIs have the potential to cause significant neurological damage.
Knowing this, individuals who have survived any type of blow to the head may want to consider taking an IQ test so they can discover just how much their mind has been affected. Based on the results of the study, the effects of mild TBIs can actually be quite severe.
To find out how devastating a mild TBI can be, researchers watched the injury play out on a living brain. What they observed was swelling that led to a reduction in blood flow. This, in turn, led to neuron connection damage that resulted in these links' eventual death.
"We saw every branch, every small wire and how it gets cut," said Sergei Kirov, a neuroscientist and the director of the Human Brain Lab at Georgia Regents' Medical College. "We saw how it destroys networks. It really goes downhill. It's the first time we know of that someone has watched this type of minor injury play out over the course of 24 hours."
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