Savannah Morning News, Sunday, December 2, 2007 -- Laboran Pickens sits inside the busy Savannah coffeehouse.

He flinches every time the grinders whine so strangers can walk away with frothy, caffeinated beverages.

He looks nervous. He assures his company he's fine.

He's on medication from Georgia Regional Medical Center.

It helps, but not always.

The Iraq nightmares still come, medicine or not.

Sometimes the spell is prompted by a loud noise or errant thought. It makes him space out. He moves like he's in a dream. He often disappears from his Hinesville home, sometimes for hours.

His wife spends those hours frantic, wondering where he is. She worries each time will be his last. That he won't come back to her and their three children.

He returns, but remembers nothing.

At 30, he is a shell of the man he once was.

'Signature wounds'

It is estimated that up to 20 percent of the 1.5 million men and women who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq since America's War on Terror began may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injuries, according to the Defense and Veteran Brain Injury Center, which is part of the Walter Reed Medical Center.

And a 22-month study by Veterans for America of all soldiers returning to Fort Carson, Colo., found more than 17 percent of all servicemen and women who had deployed from the installation had some form of traumatic brain injury.

Veterans organizations fear that thousands of soldiers are living undiagnosed.

Many have left the military. Or, like Pickens, were asked to leave.

They carry invisible scars.

These wounds take the form of honorable discharges, public disturbances, police reports, missing memories, sleepless nights.

And their numbers are only increasing.

Continue reading the article.

Labels: brain injuries, Iraq War, traumatic brain injury, Veterans

Reuters last week reported that children who suffer a head injury are quite likely to have a similar injury subsequently.

"We do not really understand the mechanism behind repetitive head injuries in children," Dr. Bonnie R. Swaine, of the University of Montreal, Canada, told Reuters Health. "These results support anecdotal evidence of the phenomenon."

As for an explanation, Swaine continued, "It is reasonable that children with a head injury who do not regain their pre-injury state of health could be at risk for another injury."

Read the entire article.

Labels: brain injuries, head injuries, TBI, traumatic brain injury

The NFL's Committee on Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) has come under fire from several sources reports the Baltimore Sun. The flack started last fall when ESPN The Magazine published an article critical of the committee's report and said "the committee skewed its data to minimize the effect and nature of concussions," a charge rejected as "totally false" by Dr. Andrew Tucker, a member of the committee since 1994 and a Ravens team physician.

Among its criticisms, the magazine said Dr. Elliot Pellman, who recently resigned as committee chair, "omitted large numbers of baseline reports from neuropsychological testing in a six-year study to arrive at figures more favorable to the league."

"People on the outside see it as industry-funded research and research that is not as accurate or sound as it should be," said Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, the research director of the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina, which has been criticized by Pellman's group for some of its work.

"That was basically done to protect the image of the game, of the league. It's troubling to me and many others that there is all this work out on retired NFL players and they have chosen to ignore the findings."

Read the entire article here and then tell us what you think. Is the NFL doing enough to protect its players and provide for them long term?

Labels: brain injuries, concussion, NFL, TBI, traumatic brain injury