How do you, a medical student, write an essay on mild traumatic brain injury?
I wrote my dissertation on mTBI and I had this whole amazing group who are my co-authors as supervisors to varying degrees. Thanks to good supervision and an exciting project, I opened my eyes to research. I myself enjoyed reading ABC articles during my studies, and there was an article missing about mTBI. Two years ago, I was a retired handball player and had myself suffered two TBIs, which contributed to the interest in managing this patient group because it is a frequently occurring injury in handball.
What is the most difficult part of the process?
It is a heterogeneous patient group suffering from mTBI. One difficulty is being able to safely determine who should undergo DT. Another difficulty is determining who should be accepted for surveillance.
How do I need to update the status of the evidence?
We have a large anticoagulation-treated population with mTBI in which the initial DT is blank. Hospitalization with observation is currently recommended for this group. One can consider population-level health gains through implicit observation, when recent studies indicate a decreased incidence of late bleeding.
What challenges will be faced as the population ages?
Older adults who actually fall constitute a large proportion of mTBI patients in the Western world. With increasing age, rates of comorbidities increase, which may mean that there are multiple risk factors for bleeding in mTBI. The challenge will be to choose who has increased risk and how to best manage this group.
What specialty do you dream of in the future?
Anesthesia and intensive care!
Medical Journal 48-49/2023
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