Dexter And Cape Girardeau Missouri Car Accident Lawyers Offer Facts About Brain Injuries
The Dexter and surrounding Southeast Missouri Car Accident Lawyers want to share with you some facts about brain injuries.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Injury Prevention, 1.7 million people suffer a brain injury each year. 17% or 289,000 of these are suffered as the result of injuries sustained in traffic accidents.
A brain injury can change everything about you in just a matter of seconds. How we think, how we function in our lives, how our bodies function, and even who we are can literally be instantly altered by a brain injury. Our brains are the most complex organ in our bodies and no two are alike and no two brain injuries are alike. This means a brain injury is just as complex as the brain itself. A brain injury is affected by the cause of the injury, the location in the brain, and the severity of the incident.
In the field of medicine the severity of the injury is often predicted as the more severe the injury the less improvement can be expected. And severity is typically measured by the length of the coma, the duration of the loss of consciousness, and/or the length of post-traumatic amnesia. But the location of the injury can sometimes be a stronger indicator, with the frontal lobes being the most impacted for executive function and personality changes.
In the legal field severity is measured by the greater impact of how it has changed a person's day-to-day life and what this means in loss of function, disability, or the need for life-time care.
A brain injury can be very obvious or very subtle. Sometimes there are no visible physical impairments or losses. Brain injuries can present with all sorts of deficits in very different areas from personality trait changes to memory impairment or memory loss to depression and malaise. The deficit or change suffered may be a loss of appetite or a new found inability to cope.
