AMRI provides you with all of the tools to successfully complete your PALS recertification. Our course is fast and flexible. Renew your PALS Certification today!
More than one million athletes are afflicted with a concussion each year in the United States. However, until now, there hasn’t been a definitive way to accurately detect and diagnose a concussion. That is about to change.
According to a recent article by Sue Hughes of Medscape Medical News entitled New Transcranial Doppler Device Diagnoses Concussion, a sophisticated new ultrasound device has been developed by Neural Analytics, a leading-edge technology firm based in Los Angeles. This device, which can detect and analyze subtle variations in blood flow throughout the brain, is proving to be a useful diagnostic tool when treating victims of head trauma.
Dr. Robert Hamilton, PhD is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Neural Analytics. He led a study testing the effectiveness of this new device. Speaking with Medscape, Dr. Hamilton stated, “At present, concussion is diagnosed by assessing symptoms, but these can be very variable and difficult to interpret. Analyzing blood flow patterns with transcranial Doppler and using a computer algorithm to quantify injury could be the first physiologic measure of concussion.”
He and his team published the results of their study on April 13 in the American Academy of Neurology (AAN). For the purpose of the study, researchers used their new device to map the flow of blood in the brains of 66 high school athletes who had recently been diagnosed with a concussion. They compared their findings against 169 other high-school athletes who had not been diagnosed with concussion. They rant their test using athletes from both contact and non-contact sports, and their participants were made up of approximately 70% male and 30% female students.
Science Daily reports that Dr. Hamilton stated, “There is growing evidence that concussions can change the blood flow in the brain. While such changes may be detected with MRI, we believe there may be a less expensive and portable way to measure these changes with a transcranial Doppler (TCD) device.”
Neural Analytic’s advanced version of TCD ultrasound gave a more complete picture of how blood moves through the middle cerebral artery and the researchers discovered that their device was able to successfully distinguish between a concussed brain and a non-concussed brain 83% of the time.
You can read more about the full study at Science Daily or at Medscape.