Over the past few years, it’s become widely known among the scientific community that traumatic brain injuries, or concussions as they’re more often called, can result in lasting physical and mental damage for the sufferer — a reality that only entered the public consciousness with the emergence of lawsuits filed against the NFL, alleging that they had ignored the evidence showing this when it came to their own players.
But while we know that a concussion can leave you with more than dizziness and a temporary headache, it’s been harder to understand exactly why. Now, new research published in the Radiological Society of North America claims to have possibly figured out part of the mystery. The study authors say they were able to detect unique brain patterns among people suffering from depression or anxiety as a result of their concussion when compared to the brains of those concussion sufferers with no reported mental problems — in some cases, these patterns resembled the brains of those whose mental illness wasn’t caused by head trauma.
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