What is Brain Injury?

The term brain injury is used to express the damage to the brain tissues by external forces or damage caused by something happening inside the brain.

How common is brain injury?

It has been reported that as many as 135,000 people admitted into hospital are confirmed as having a brain injury. Those at most risk are people in the 15-29 age group and particularly men.

Effects of brain injury on the person

Brain injury affects each person differently. The effects can include physical and sensory difficulties, behavioural and mood changes and cognitive problems. The effects of the brain injury may not be obvious to other people because it is often referred to as the hidden disability.

Each part of the brain funtions differently and therefore when a region of the brain is damaged, individuals can lose significant functions such as:

Frontal lobe : Planning and organising actions, learning tasks, initiating and stopping, regulating behaviour, abstract thought, logic, language, personality.

Temporal lobe : Learning new information, recording and storage of verbal memory (such as names), and visual memory (such as faces); attention.

Parietal lobe : Remembering sequences of actions, body sense (e.g. sensing where one limb is in relation to the rest of the body), sentence construction, calculation, interpreting visual information received from the occipital lobe, locating objects.

Occipital lobe : Processing information about colour, shape and movement received from the eyes.

Brain injury can completely change the life of the person and the people around them.

Effects of brain injury on the family

Some would say that the real victim in brain injury are the family members as they have the accurate insight into the problem. Families experience high levels of anxiety and depression following a brain injury in the family.

Families need to be able to be flexible and communicate openly for relationships to cope.