by KAREN WEINTRAUB / Special for USA TODAY KING5.com Posted on June 26, 2014 at 1:47 PM Updated today at 1:47 PM Veterans who had multiple risk factors such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or heart disease in addition to head injury were more likely to develop dementia. It's not clear why head injuries may play a role in dementia, said lead researcher Deborah Barnes, an epidemiologist at the VA and associate professor at UCSF, but it's possible that the more insults the brain experiences, the more vulnerable it becomes to dementia. It's also plausible that a brain injury could lead directly to the development of brain plaques that eventually cause Alzheimer's, she said. Other researchers were quick to note that the injuries studied were severe, traumatic brain injuries, not the kind of everyday concussions that happen on the soccer field. There's no evidence that those kind of milder injuries lead to later problems, said Jeffrey Kutcher, a neurologist, concussion expert and associate professor at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor. Dementia is caused by a variety of factors, Kutcher said, including genetics, lifestyle and injuries. As it's impossible to completely prevent injuries, more effort should be … Continue reading →

The discovery of a new link between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), pain and children with traumatic brain injuries could lead to better treatment methods, according to a new study. University of Queensland researcher Erin Brown said the study, led by the Centre of National Research on Disability and Rehabilitation Medicine (CONROD), found PTSD was contributing to pain in children with traumatic brain injuries, and not the other way around. It has been well established that PTSD and pain are related after injury, but until now it has been unclear whether pain is causing children to develop PTSD, or whether PTSD is causing the pain, Ms Brown said. The study indicates that PTSD is the driving cause of lingering pain in children with a traumatic brain injury. This contradicts previous theories that PTSD may have been caused by lingering pain. Ms Brown said the study had allowed researchers to propose a new model for understanding how PTSD is related to pain in children with traumatic brain injuries. The findings may aid the clinical treatment of children recovering from head injuries. Our research shows that children with a traumatic brain injury may benefit from being screened for PTSD, Ms Brown said. Those … Continue reading →

Older military veterans who have suffered a serious head injury are more likely to be diagnosed with dementia than uninjured veterans, according to a new study. The report looked at traumatic brain injury (TBI), which includes concussions, skull fractures and bleeding inside the skull. There have been a fair number of previous studies that have looked at the relationship between TBI and risk of dementia, and some have found an association while others haven't, said lead author Deborah E. Barnes, from the University of California, San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She and her colleagues sought to clarify the relationship by taking into account other conditions, like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And we found that, even after accounting for these other factors, older veterans with a history of TBI were 60 percent more likely to develop dementia, Barnes told Reuters Health in an email. Dementia affects five percent of people in their 70s and 37 percent of those in their 90s, according to past research. For the new study, the researchers examined the medical records of more than 188,000 U.S. veterans ages 55 and older who had undergone a medical evaluation between 2000 and … Continue reading →

Contact Information Available for logged-in reporters only Newswise DALLAS June 26, 2014 A drug that blocks the action of the enzyme Cdk5 could substantially reduce brain damage if administered shortly after a stroke, UT Southwestern Medical Center research suggests. The findings, reported in the June 11 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, determined in rodent models that aberrant Cdk5 activity causes nerve cell death during stroke. If you inhibit Cdk5, then the vast majority of brain tissue stays alive without oxygen for up to one hour, said Dr. James Bibb, Associate Professor of Neurology and Neurotherapeutics at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study. This result tells us that Cdk5 is a central player in nerve cell death. More importantly, development of a Cdk5 inhibitor as an acute neuroprotective therapy has the potential to reduce stroke injury. If we could block Cdk5 in patients who have just suffered a stroke, we may be able to reduce the number of patients in our hospitals who become disabled or die from stroke. Doing so would have a major impact on health care, Dr. Bibb said. While several pharmaceutical companies worked to develop Cdk5 inhibitors years ago, these efforts were largely abandoned … Continue reading →