To download the below information click here

What’s the difference between one type of brain injury and another?

The main difference between one brain injury and another is whether it is traumatic or not – that always means physical trauma (as in the head being struck and shaken very sharply), it’s not about an emotional sort of trauma.

Traumatic injury to the brain tends to cause a combination of both diffuse and focal brain damage –

Diffuse damage breaks connections between nerve cells in different parts of the brain and tends to cause complex disturbances of cognition and behaviour because the nerve cells can’t communicate so well. The time towards recovering abilities is long and depends upon sustained and repeated practice. By contrast, focal damage (for example, stroke caused by blood haemorrhage into the brain or by blockage of a major artery in the brain) causes death of all neurons in the centre of the damaged area – only those around the margin of the lesion are potentially recoverable while the rest of the brain is normal. Recovery after a focal lesion alone (as in most cases of stroke) occurs over a significantly shorter time and is much less likely to cause disturbed behaviour, impaired cognition usually being milder and less overt than after diffuse injuries. As well as in stroke, traumatic brain injuries can have focal sites, near a point of impact in a head injury or where the brain bounces and crushes inside the skull opposite the point of impact.

Diffuse damage is also common after brain injuries from other causes, such as subarachnoid haemorrhage, viral encephalitis and hypoxic brain damage (for example by near-drowning, prolonged cardiac arrest or serious drug overdose). So people recovering from these will need the same kind of rehabilitation as those with acquired traumatic brain injury.

Traumatic Brain Injury is the most common type of ABI and it’s distinct because – 

medically the common mechanism of injury in sharply impacting and shaking everything inside the skull causes the widespread damage of “diffuse axonal injury”, perhaps in several different brain areas, together with possible “focal” damage at impact points (or bleed points)

rehabilitatively the complexity and sophistication of techniques needed to achieve rehabilitation after diffuse or diffuse + focal injury and the range of experienced professional input that is necessary

+ People with all types of brain injury have widely varied personal and social situations which determine their real rehabilitation needs along with the medical facts of whichever type of brain injury they’ve experienced.