Cheerleader's Injury Highlights Need for New Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair

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Newswise DALLAS Feb. 28, 2014 Ever since 18-year-old Kennedy Garza-Espindola tumbled from the top of a cheerleading formation in late 2012, hitting her head twice in the fall to the ground, getting back to normal has been an unimaginable challenge.

As a result of the serious concussion suffered in a Saginaw High School gymnasium, Ms. Garza-Espindola has had to find new ways of processing information and dealing with social situations. Her recovery is painfully slow and could take years due to the unseen damage the injury inflicted on her brain.

I may look fine on the outside, but nobody knows what a brain injury is like until they experience it, said Ms. Garza-Espindola, now a freshman majoring in nursing at Texas State University in San Marcos. You have no idea how bad it can be.

Ms. Garza-Espindola is the type of patient the new Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair at UTSouthwestern Medical Center aims to help. The Institute, which was launched on February 28 by UTSouthwestern, will undertake basic and translational research that will promote better understanding of brain damage at the cellular level and will seek to identify new therapeutic opportunities that, ultimately, can be translated into innovative, improved clinical care.

The development of this Institute at UTSouthwestern is very timely, as concussion has become a public concern. We know that no two concussions are alike, and risk factors for prolonged recovery are poorly understood, said Dr. Munro Cullum, Director of Neuropsychology at UTSouthwestern and part of the new Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair at UTSouthwestern. There is so much to be learned about concussions such as Ms. Garza-Espindolas, including improving diagnosis, identifying those at risk for prolonged recovery, determining factors predictive of recovery course, maximizing treatment, and understanding long-term effects.

Although Ms. Garza-Espindolas long-term recovery plan is a work in progress, she has made steady, gradual improvement. Among the concussions effects were abnormally variable emotions, ranging from depression to anger to apathy. She now takes antidepressant medication and undergoes therapy to help manage the effects.

My emotions were crazy. I found myself getting mad for no reason, and I sometimes just burst into tears, she said. The emotions became overwhelming and would come out of nowhere.

When the injury occurred, her mother, Elizabeth Flores, and school officials initially thought she had recovered from the fall, since she passed a concussion test shortly after the incident. But on the way to a doctor later that day for a checkup, her world literally spun out of control.

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Cheerleader's Injury Highlights Need for New Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair