“Robert Card had evidence of traumatic brain injury. In the white matter, the nerve fibers that allow for communication between different areas of the brain, there was significant degeneration, axonal and myelin loss, inflammation, and small blood vessel injury,” lead author Ann McKee said in a statement issued by the family and the Concussion Legacy Foundation.
The family apologized for the attack and said they hoped that publicizing the findings of the scan might help “prevent future tragedies.”
The findings align with previous studies on the effects of blast injuries, McKee said. Card was a firearms instructor and worked at an Army hand grenade training range, where he may have been exposed to thousands of blasts, the statement said.
“While I cannot say with certainty that these pathological findings underlie Mr. Card’s behavioral changes in the last 10 months of life, based on our previous work, brain injury likely played a role in his symptoms,” she continued.
e; on the subject of soldiers getting TBIs from blasts during training, it’s still a big problem as of November 2023
Special Operations troops were training with rocket launchers again.
Each operator held a launch tube on his shoulder, a few inches from his head, then took aim and sent a rocket flying at 500 miles an hour. And each launch sent a shock wave whipping through every cell in the operator’s brain.
For generations, the military assumed that this kind of blast exposure was safe, even as evidence mounted that repetitive blasts may do serious and lasting harm.
In recent years, Congress, pressed by veterans who were exposed to these shock waves, has ordered the military to set safety limits and start tracking troops’ exposure. In response, the Pentagon created a sprawling Warfighter Brain Health Initiative to study the issue, gather data and propose corrective strategies. And last year, for the first time, it set a threshold above which a weapon blast is considered hazardous.
Despite the order, though, things have hardly changed on the ground. Training continues largely as it did before. Troops say they see little being done to limit or track blast exposure. And weapons like shoulder-fired rockets that are known to deliver a shock wave well above the safety threshold are still in wide use.
The disconnect fits a pattern that has repeated for more than a decade: Top leaders talk of the importance of protecting troops’ brains, but the military fails to take practical steps to ensure safety.
I think this is one of the more recent and comprehensive summaries of research on the topic, but in general as I (not a doctor) understand it, the other commenter is right, impacts of any kind are not good for brains, and I think impacts that occur while the brain is already healing from a prior impact are especially not good. Moreover, TBIs can be really minor and have symptoms that are slight enough they’re hard to notice, but that’s when that “impacts that occur while the brain is already healing” thing becomes such a problem - temporary injuries that people don’t realize they have become more permanent.
However, all that being said - with the right therapeutic interventions and given enough time for neuroplasticity to have an effect, physically damaged brains can regain a lot of their function. It’s kind of a scary thing to contemplate when you really start thinking about how fragile the hardware that supports our minds is, but a brain injury is not an insurmountable thing people have to be stuck with the rest of their lives.