News about brain injuries in Iraq doesn't stop:

Frontline combat troops in the Iraq war have at least a one in five chance of coming home with a brain injury, according to Chris Elia, a Veterans Affairs psychologist who spoke Friday about traumatic brain injuries in veterans at the second annual Black Hills Brain Injury Conference in Rapid City.

“And I suspect it’s a much higher chance than that,” Elia said, presenting an array of statistics about what has become the “signature wound” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of the 23,000 U.S. soldiers, marines and other military personnel who have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002, more than 6,500 have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, according to military figures. Elia said those numbers are probably low, given what today’s war is still teaching medical experts about blast injuries.

What a shame that it's literally taken a war to bring TBI front and center. Hardly a day goes by now that TBI is not in the news, and word of advances in TBI research hits the media with unusual frequency. Advocates for brain injury research have wanted this for a long time, but who could have forseen that a war would be necessary to accomplish it? The universe does indeed work in mysterious ways, but I can't imagine anyone who'd have chosen this route to brain-injury awareness.

Read the complete article here.

Labels: Iraq veterans, Iraq War, TBI, TBI research, traumatic brain injury