A 41-year-old study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) shows that people who have suffered from a serious brain injury or trauma to the head are more likely to die prematurely, before the age of 56.
Researchers followed Swedes who were born after 1954 and who had received treatment, either inpatient or outpatient, for a traumatic brain injury, otherwise known as a TBI, between 1969 and 2009. Researchers followed nearly 220,000 TBI victims. They compared people who suffered from a TBI to the general population, their brothers, sisters, and parents. Researchers also took in to account a subject's age, gender, severity of the TBI, and how it affected the person's financial success in life thereafter.
Research shows that someone who has suffered from a TBI is three times more likely to die before the age of 56 than most other people. They were also surprised to find that people who were previously diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, then suffered a TBI, were twenty times more likely to die before the age of 56.
Many of those who suffered from a TBI and died prematurely were a victim of provoked assault, suffered a fatal injury, or committed suicide.
One researcher explained that current guidelines do not call for the assessment of mental health or suicide risk in TBI patients, but instead focus on short-term recovery. He says that by considering what they have found in this forty year study, physicians should be required to monitor victims of TBIs much more carefully and follow up to look for signs of suicidal tendencies, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and other such disorders that, if caught in time, are very treatable.
As more details from the study unfold and more stories about athletes and others who commit suicide after suffering a TBI start to surface, decision-makers in the medical field will continue to face a barrage of questions over the next few years. One fact that remains certain is that the rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide are exponentially larger for sufferers of TBI compared to their non-TBI suffering peers.
Source: CBS News, "Traumatic brain injury triples risk for early death, study says" 16 January 2014