#M nerding out about medical/emergency medicine stuff

[marieshyperf1xations]

The FIA just (a few days ago actually but I only now got around to making this post) put out a leaflet/information campaign about head injuries and more specifically concussions in motorsport, which I found really interesting and helpful, not just for those in motorsport but life in general

The tl;dr of it is: you don’t necessarily have to have hit your head in order to get a concussion, the warning signs are especially headaches, nausea and dizziness; if in doubt go see a doctor.

Now for the slightly longer/nerdy ramble under the cut:

Concussions are a mild form of traumatic brain injury (also called mTBI), that are most commonly associated with (motor vehicle) accidents, but can happen in a variety of different ways, basically any time sudden deceleration of the head happens.

The brain isn’t “attached” to anything in the skull strictly speaking, it sits in its cavity, protected by layers of skin and a fluid called “cerebrospinal fluid”. I’ve put a diagram below where you can see the layout of the head/skull/meninges. The cerebrospinal fluid isn’t labelled in the image, but it fills the spongey-looking space between the arachnoid and pia mater.

That fluid is meant to protect the brain from mild trauma, but it can only absorb so much force. When you experience rapid deceleration of any kind (so whether you directly hit your head or “just” suddenly stop) your brain can hit the inside of your skull, if it’s too much for the cerebrospinal fluid to buffer.

When the brain hits the inside of the skull in the worst case scenario it can bruise like any other part of the body, but since the cavity of the skull is closed off, there’s no way for the pressure to escape and it can seriously and permanently damage the brain, which is part of the reason why head injuries need to be so carefully watched.

As seen above the most common symptoms are headaches, dizziness, nausea, disorientation, memory issues, changes in character/behaviour and coordination issues, but that list is non-exhaustive. Apart from the risk of a more serious TBI being overlooked, in motorsport there’s also the effects of the symptoms that can lead to accidents. I don’t think I need to go into too much detail how dizziness spells or problems with vision impact racing drivers going wheel-to-wheel with each other at 300+kph, but I want to stress that this also goes for “normal” people in road cars or other every day situations. Cue the motto of the FIA’s campaign “If in doubt, sit out”.

As for first aid, the things you can do are rather limited, but the most important thing is to get somebody with a suspected brain injury to a hospital or medical centre as quickly as possible. Since patients with concussions will oftentimes vomit, it’s good to be prepared for that when taking someone to the hospital and with unconscious patients it’s even more likely and therefore important than usual to limit the risk of them choking on their own sick by putting them into recovery position (image below, but also brush up on your first aid course if you don’t know/remember this) or (if you’re trained and have the materials) otherwise protect their airways.

For some reason tumblr won’t let me link the pdf or the article, so I’ll just put it at the end here.

(Legal stuff:) Disclaimer that while I’m a paramedic and not just talking out of my arse on this, I’m not a medical authority, and this isn’t legal medical advice or anything of that nature, I’m just trying to raise awareness for brain injuries, concussions and the FIAs campaign and you should always contact medical personnel over things like this and call your local emergency number when you witness a medical emergency of any nature (144 in Austria, 112 generally in Europe, 999 in the UK and 911 in the US as far as I’m aware)

Link: https://www.fia.com/news/concussion-awareness-campaign