Some of this information comes from the SAAQ brochure, Traumatic Brain Injury.
TBIs can cause serious impairments (damages) that disrupt the daily and social lives of brain-injured persons and of their friends and relatives, often for a long period of time, and sometimes for the rest of their lives. [1]
It is important to understand that: A brain-injured person will not present all the following symptoms. The consequences of TBI will vary in quantity, intensity and nature from one person to the next.
A brain injury may accentuate personality traits or pre-trauma problems.
Consequences are presented in four categories.
Physical consequences
• Convulsions
• Reduced motor functions: difficulties faced moving and getting around
• Reduced coordination: ability to organize movements in a specific sequence
• Presence of abnormal movements like tremors and spasticity ("Spasticity" refers to sudden and involuntary movements.)
• Slowness of movement
• Loss of balance
• Paralysis
• Changes in one’s voice
• Difficulty feeding oneself
• Sensory loss:
- Vision (eyes): seeing double, loss of visual field
- Audition (ears): hearing problems, ringing in the ears
- Smell (nose): loss or absence of one’s sense of smell
- Taste (mouth): food does not taste the same as before the accident or is tasteless
- Touch (skin): reduced sensitivity to touch, heat, cold and pain
- Sensory hallucinations: smelling odours or perceiving sounds when there are none.
• Headaches
• Medical complications may affect the lungs, intestines, muscles, bones, skin or digestion. [2]
Intellectual consequences
• Problems with attention span and concentration
- Lack of selective attention (concentrating on one specific subject or event at a time) - Inability to concentrate long enough on a specific task
• Difficulty remembering, learning and understanding
- Difficulty understanding and reusing information
- Faltering short- and long-term memory
• Difficulty having a conversation with another person
• Difficulty planning or starting daily activities
• Difficulty taking a stand, evaluating a situation, and exercising judgment
• Difficulty organizing information (problems in one’s thought process)
• Difficulty carrying out some tasks like getting dressed or preparing a meal, despite the absence of physical problems (apraxia) • Difficulty speaking, reading, writing, counting, drawing (difficulty communicating information)
• Problems beginning a particular task, and once begun, having difficulty stopping.
Behavioural consequences
• Agitation
• Irritability: quickly getting angry
• Violent verbal or physical outbreaks
• Impulsiveness: reacting without thinking
• Anger
• Depression
• Self-mutilation: deliberately injuring oneself
• Thoughts of suicide
• Egocentric in personal relationships: self-centered and infantile behaviour
• Lowered inhibitions: less control, resulting in violations of generally accepted social norms
Emotional consequences
• Mood swings: tendency to laugh or cry without apparent reason, quickly moving from one emotional state to another (from sadness to euphoria)
• Diminished control over emotions
• Diminishing capacity for self-criticism: difficulty controlling one’s behaviour and actions
• Intolerance when needs are not met
• Difficulty understanding what other people can feel or think
• Lower self-esteem: putting oneself down, feeling unable to carry out former roles as a parent or spouse
• Apathy: less zest for life, little motivation for tackling new projects
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