Military Leads in Treating Traumatic Brain Injury, Expert Says

13:04 GMT, September 2, 2012 BETHESDA, Md. | The proper management of traumatic brain injuries has become a military medical standard of care thats returning 95 percent of service members with mild TBI back to the field within five days, said an Army neurologist who served on a Joint Chiefs of Staff panel to develop the protocol.

Army (Dr.) Col. Geoffrey Ling, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, addressed medical care providers Aug. 27 on the militarys model approach to TBI in a lecture at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence on the campus of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, here.

Ling, who retires today, has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as both a professor and interim chairman of neurology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and director of neurocritical care at Walter Reed. He also is an attending neurocritical care physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and has a doctorate in pharmacology.

TBI is considered a signature wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the adversity of war and the incidence of TBI, Ling said, the opportunity arose to do something about it.

Weve developed a system of care to identify that this was a very important disease, and to learn how to properly manage it, Ling said. That required a system from point of entry all the way through rehabilitation, [requiring] a standard, evidence-based approach, and the military created that.

While military doctors often seek standards of care from the civilian sector, protocol for treating brain injuries was not available, he said.

By developing the TBI system of care, military medicine has created a model for civilians, Ling said, adding that he wants private medical institutions to learn about the militarys approach.

Today, after three or four years of study, which Ling calls a remarkable achievement, military doctors to leaders in the field are educated in TBI and know that early screening is critical to diagnose and treat the disease from mild to severe cases, he said. The diagnostic procedure used is called MACE -- the Military Acute Concussion Evaluation.

Ling pointed out that renowned teaching medical centers around the country do not have concussion centers, but military posts in war zones do.

If you go to Kandahar, Bagram or Herat and ask where the concussion center is, someone will point to it, he said.

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Military Leads in Treating Traumatic Brain Injury, Expert Says