Blue Light May Aid Recovery After Concussion

ISLAMABAD (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th January, 2020) Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), or concussion, can result from a range of causes, from a car accident to fights, falls, or sports.Following such an injury, people might see stars, become disoriented, or even lose consciousness briefly, but many come round without realizing that they have been concussed at all.However, for some, mTBI can result in weeks or months of symptoms, including headaches, mental fogginess, dizziness, memory loss, fatigue, and disturbed sleep.

According to the researchers behind the current study, some 50% of people with mTBI complain of chronic sleep problems after the injury, which affects their ability to think and recover.Scientists believe that these symptoms occur due to the stretches and tears that the impact inflicts on microscopic brain cells."Your brain is about the consistency of thick Jell-O," explains lead author William D.

"Scott" Killgore, a psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Imagine a bowl of Jell-O getting hit from a punch or slamming against the steering wheel in a car accident. What's it doing? It's absorbing that shock and bouncing around.

During that impact, microscopic brain cells thinner than a strand of hair can easily stretch and tear and rip from the force."Such injury can also occur during explosive blasts, when shock waves hitting the soft tissue of the gut push a surge of pressure into the brain, damaging blood vessels and brain tissue."At present, there are virtually no effective treatments for concussion," said Killgore.

"We sought a nonpharmacologic (or nondrug) method to help people."Killgore and his research team received funding from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command to conduct the study, which features in the journal Neurobiology of Disease.The solution that they set out to prove effective was sleep."Because sleep is so important for brain health and recovery, we reasoned that improving sleep timing and duration could lead to a more rapid recovery from mTBI," said Killgore.

"Considerable evidence suggests that sleep is important for brain repair processes," he added.Killgore explained that scientists have shown that following an injury, sleep facilitates the production of new insulating brain cells called oligodendrocytes.