Head injuries may lead to later life dementia

Caveat - in a large scale longitudinal study traumatic brain injury correlates with the development of dementia in later life in a 'dose dependent' manner.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5331147/Suffering-blow-head-raises-risk-dementia.html

If causal - the exact mechanism remains undetermined but does suggest that some process continues after the initial injury is assumed to have healed (see post concussion syndrome - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-concussion_syndrome).

 

Did you see the film “Concussion”? It was based from a true story. I met a few people in my lifetime who had head trauma, from a car accident, and never fully recovered. It’s very sad. I hope we can learn more about concussions, and also do more research to find out if head trauma is related to ME.

 

I haven't seen the film but it all seems plausible. Interesting in the case of post-concussion syndrome that once patients fail to recover as expected they start invoking psychological pre-dispositions and perpetuating factors.

 

I thought I'd seen post-concussion syndrome mentioned in descriptions of Medically Unexplained Symptoms.

Having googled "post concussion syndrome medically unexplained symptoms" the very first result (of many) gave me this - see section 4.6 on pages 11 and 12 :

https://www.uea.ac.uk/documents/246...ide-.pdf/ac806084-4058-4a2f-89f9-17d04eff6a3b

I've never seen that particular report before, and can I just say it made me feel sick. And of course, being a report about MUS it just has to mention "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" - see section 2.3 on page 6.

A later result gave me this, which I have seen before - see Table 1 on page 6:

https://www.jcpmh.info/wp-content/uploads/jcpmh-mus-guide.pdf

It means of course, that if post-concussion syndrome in the UK is declared to be "functional", then nobody is ever going to research it here, so no tests or biomarkers will ever be developed. Sound familiar to anyone?

 

Seems that MUS translates too “ we are too cheap to muster up the money to spend on medical research”

 

Free healthcare is great, until you get sick.

 

Yeah, you get lots of familiar faces turning up in that area. Bleurgh!

 

Free healthcare is great if you're too poor to pay hundreds or thousands of pounds for doctor appointments and hospital treatment and pharma drugs.

Free healthcare is also great if you couldn't get insurance under any circumstances because you've had many years of poor health.

Free healthcare is also great if you don't want to go bankrupt and end up homeless and living on the streets just because you got sick or had an accident.

 

You both have a point, @Sisyphus and @Arnie Pye.

Of course every country needs a free health care system - you're totally right, @Arnie Pye. Just saw that video of the US guy with ALS pleading to Trump not to roll back Obamacare because he would lose access to treatment. That's why you need free health care.

But then the downside: when free healthcare is provided by the government purse, it goes hand-in-hand with money saving initiatives like MUS centres.

 

Here is the article, which is open access. @Marco, please feel free to add the link to your OP so people can directly click through if they want to:

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002496

The study is problematic, because it collapses across alzheimer's (AD) and vascular dementia, and the second one isn't really a form of degenerative disease (its actually a series of mini strokes that happen over a period of time giving the impression of a gradual cognitive decline). Vascular dementia has entirely different causes from AD.

If they had just reported results for AD, that would have been interesting. It might have suggested that some of the inflammatory processes that are involved at the site of injury make you at greater risk of AD later in life.

But because they combined apples and oranges, all we can say is that TBI predicts "bad stuff" later in life.

There's also a possible measurement problem, because people who've had a TBI might perform more poorly on a whole host of tests because of their TBI. This may mean they reach the threshold for diagnosis much sooner than non-TBI patients.

 

The problems we are having in the UK with regard to health and benefits are ideological rather than anything else. Government propaganda is working well and many people have been persuaded that the sick, the disabled and the unemployed are a bunch of work-shy scroungers. This won't change even if (when) our healthcare system is converted into a private system. The sick, the disabled and the unemployed will still be considered to be work-shy scroungers, and there will still be MUS centres.