Army to begin testing scanning equipment for brain injuries

A soldier, who suffered a brain injury in a bomb blast in Iraq, expresses frustration when he loses his train of thought and forgets what he was going to say. Traumatic brain injury can be caused without any visible injuries when explosives jar the brain inside the skull. Symptoms can range from headaches, irritability and sleep disorders to memory problems, depression and epilepsy.

The U.S. Army, faced with thousands of cases of brain injury from the Iraq war, will soon begin testing brain scanning equipment in hopes of finding a more accurate way to identify hard-to-diagnose wounds.

Fort Carson hopes to get a new scanning camera in two weeks that uses gamma rays and radioisotopes, Col. John Cho, commander of the Evans Army Community Hospital at Fort Carson, said Tuesday.

To date, the Army has not extensively used neuroimaging equipment to detect brain injuries in returning soldiers because not enough testing has been done to judge the technology's effectiveness.

The move to try to detect brain injuries comes after a recent study at Fort Carson found that 18 percent of troops who had been to Iraq — 2,392 of 13,400 — suffered at least some brain damage from the blasts of improvised explosive devices.

Read the rest at the International Herald Tribune

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