Posts tagged case study
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Second impact syndrome: A devastating injury to the young brain
Physicians at Indiana University School of Medicine and the Northwest Radiology Network (Indianapolis, Indiana) report the case of a 17-year-old high school football player with second impact syndrome (SIS). A rare and devastating traumatic brain injury, SIS occurs when a person, most often a teenager, sustains a second head injury before recovery from an earlier head injury is complete. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first reported case in which imaging studies were performed after both injuries, adding new knowledge of the event. Findings in this case are reported and discussed in “Second impact syndrome in football: new imaging and insights into a rare and devastating condition. Case report,” by Elizabeth Weinstein, M.D., and colleagues, published today online, ahead of print, in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics.
3D reconstruction of Phineas Gage’s skull, showing the passage of the tamping iron. Read about Gage’s connectome here
The World’s Most Famous Brain
In the summer of 1953, Henry Gustav Molaison (1926-2008) underwent brain surgery to contain epileptic seizures that had become critically debilitating. The intervention brought some relief from convulsions, but these positive results were overshadowed by an astonishing and indelible side effect. Soon after the operation, it became apparent that he could no longer recognize hospital staff, he did not remember the way home, he did not remember newspaper articles he had just read, nor the crossword puzzles he had solved; otherwise, he was completely normal. Since the time of the surgery, more than five decades of scrupulous neuropsychological research examined the nature of patient H.M.’s amnesia which proved to be both persistent and remarkably selective.
The goal of our project is to provide a window into the brain of the man who helped establish the scientific study of memory and unfailingly forgot the enormously generous contribution he made to medical research.