Have you ever wondered if a child could sustain a serious head injury from a fall or a bicycle accident?
Keeping your children safe and monitoring all their activities can be quite the task. It could get really frustrating keeping your eyes on them at all times: One minute, they are really quiet and have something to occupy their hands; the next minute, they are trying out a stunt they saw Spiderman pull. While not all tumbles result in brain injury, it can happen.
Keeping your children safe and monitoring all their activities can be quite the task. It could get really frustrating keeping your eyes on them at all times: One minute, they are really quiet and have something to occupy their hands; the next minute, they are trying out a stunt they saw Spiderman pull. While not all tumbles result in brain injury, it can happen.
How Serious Are Traumatic Brain Injuries in Children?
Most Traumatic Brain Injuries in children happen as a result of falls and other accidents that are typically described as mild. If a toddler climbs a shelf and takes a tumble down, or a pre-teen falls down while riding their bike, it is probably a mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI).
The criteria for classifying a Traumatic Brain Injury as mild is usually based on whether there was a loss of consciousness for 30 minutes or less, an inability to recall what happened before or after the injury, a change in mental state after the incident, or the development of neurological issues that may or may not last for a short period of time.
How Often Do mTBIs Occur?
You cannot monitor your child every single second of the day. You could as well try; but it is almost impossible to know everything that occurs with them. Your child might have hit its head yesterday when you were away from home and the nanny forgot to tell you, or they fell off their bike while they were out riding, or they tried climbing the closet door and the result was not pretty.
It is difficult to know how often injuries like these occur, as most of such injuries go unreported. Children experience head trauma all the time without feeling the need to report it if there is no visible body injury. And even when they decide to report such injuries to their parents, they brush it off as a mere scratch. The fact that some TBIs are described as ‘concussion’ instead is another cause for alarm.
Statistics have shown that nearly half a million children report to hospitals with head injuries; and approximately 180 out of every 100,000 children under 15 have been diagnosed with a TBI at one point or the other.
How Serious Can TBIs Be?
These kinds of injuries can be described as either mild, moderate or severe based on a variety of factors. Two major points important to determine severity are: The length of time wherein consciousness was lost, and the extent of memory loss displayed by the child. These are not in and of themselves enough to determine how serious the head injury is, and could be misleading or downplaying the injury.
There is a standard scoring system that grades head injuries based on severity. This is the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS). Scores on the GCS range from 3-15, resulting from aggregation of individual scores on three subscales that assess verbal responses, motor responses and eye opening. The lower the score on the scale (3-15), the worse the case of head injury.
The sheer number of children who suffer from this surprisingly common injury is enough to draw major attention. There is need for a better and proper means of diagnosing these conditions. And this must start from having more specific definitions.
More importantly, parents and care givers should ensure that they properly monitor their children to ensure their safety. They should make certain that they see a doctor if they get news of a head injury, or notice any funny activity in the child pointing towards a head injury.
Most Traumatic Brain Injuries in children happen as a result of falls and other accidents that are typically described as mild. If a toddler climbs a shelf and takes a tumble down, or a pre-teen falls down while riding their bike, it is probably a mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI).
The criteria for classifying a Traumatic Brain Injury as mild is usually based on whether there was a loss of consciousness for 30 minutes or less, an inability to recall what happened before or after the injury, a change in mental state after the incident, or the development of neurological issues that may or may not last for a short period of time.
How Often Do mTBIs Occur?
You cannot monitor your child every single second of the day. You could as well try; but it is almost impossible to know everything that occurs with them. Your child might have hit its head yesterday when you were away from home and the nanny forgot to tell you, or they fell off their bike while they were out riding, or they tried climbing the closet door and the result was not pretty.
It is difficult to know how often injuries like these occur, as most of such injuries go unreported. Children experience head trauma all the time without feeling the need to report it if there is no visible body injury. And even when they decide to report such injuries to their parents, they brush it off as a mere scratch. The fact that some TBIs are described as ‘concussion’ instead is another cause for alarm.
Statistics have shown that nearly half a million children report to hospitals with head injuries; and approximately 180 out of every 100,000 children under 15 have been diagnosed with a TBI at one point or the other.
How Serious Can TBIs Be?
These kinds of injuries can be described as either mild, moderate or severe based on a variety of factors. Two major points important to determine severity are: The length of time wherein consciousness was lost, and the extent of memory loss displayed by the child. These are not in and of themselves enough to determine how serious the head injury is, and could be misleading or downplaying the injury.
There is a standard scoring system that grades head injuries based on severity. This is the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS). Scores on the GCS range from 3-15, resulting from aggregation of individual scores on three subscales that assess verbal responses, motor responses and eye opening. The lower the score on the scale (3-15), the worse the case of head injury.
The sheer number of children who suffer from this surprisingly common injury is enough to draw major attention. There is need for a better and proper means of diagnosing these conditions. And this must start from having more specific definitions.
More importantly, parents and care givers should ensure that they properly monitor their children to ensure their safety. They should make certain that they see a doctor if they get news of a head injury, or notice any funny activity in the child pointing towards a head injury.
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