TBITalk

Traumatic Brain Injury Healing Tips

ways to heal a tbi

Healing of a TBI – 4 Ways to Accelerate Healing from a TBI

by

Healing:

When you get a traumatic brain injury (TBI), your life will probably never be the same. Although the time of healing depends on the area of your brain that was most affected, it can take up to several months to re-learn some of the most common things that you usually took for-granted; this tends to put TBI patients under a lot of stress. 

Although it is normal to have stress, too much stress can cause other serious health problems, including heart problems. Stress can affect your ability to be focused, think clearly or be organized, as well as it can have a negative impact on relationships with your closest family members and/or friends. Learning how to manage your stress should be one of your paramount concerns. When you are under stress, you will likely start to feel anxious and frustrated.

4 ways to speed up your traumatic brain injury healing:

#1: Learn To Relax:

Learning to relax is never easy, and it may be more complicated in your situation. However, there are certain things you can easily do to train your mind and body to relax. You might want to try out breathing deeply while focusing on your breathing, do some visual imagery, or thinking positive. Although it may take you some time to be able to relax, it will help a lot.

#2: Learn To Reward Yourself:

Rewards can be good and rewards can be bad; it all depends on how you manage them. Say, something like therapy, occasionally going to something like therapy is the last thing we want to go and do.  However, sometimes, we just need a push. Whenever you achieve one of your goals, reward yourself. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy or expensive. Just think about the things that give you more pleasure. It can be as simple as having that amazing cup of coffee you love, read a great book, or watch some specific TV show. Whatever works best for you.

#3: Keep A Regular Schedule:

One of the things that your brain is going to appreciate and that is going to speed up your TBI healing are routines. Just think about children, especially babies. They understand very little,  if you manage to set them to eat and sleep at the same time, everyday, their bodies and mind will quickly adapt. No matter how old you are, your brain keeps working the same way and reacts a lot better when you have routines. Make sure that you have specific times for eating and sleeping.

#4: Regular Exercise:

Getting regular exercise is good for everyone, as you already know. When you’re looking to speed up your TBI healing process, make sure regular exercise is a part of your daily routine. You do not need to workout like a bodybuilder or anything like that. Simply take a walk,  for about 30 minutes every day.

Although you don’t have complete control over your TBI healing, there are things that you can do that can make it quicker.

Check out: How Exercice Can Help Heal The Brain After a TBI

How to Prevent Neurons from Dying after Brain Injury

by

Electrical stimulation of the brain by applying current to the eye may help retinal nerve cells to survive injury. While these neurons may not be restored to full function, they are prevented from dying. But to achieve survival, their interconnections, the dendritic tree, needs to disconnect rapidly for the protective action to unfold. In a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers from Magdeburg University (Germany) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong report that for rats and mice, repetitive transorbital alternating current stimulation (rtACS) may help preserve visual neurons from cell death after injury.

Because the tissue at the back of the eye, the retina, is part of the brain, researchers can directly observe how brain cells react in the living animal. The researchers repeatedly monitored neurons in both rat and mouse retinas after an optic nerve injury and measured neuronal death after this lesion. Surprisingly, a neuroprotective treatment with electrical alternating current stimulation increased cellular survival in the eye´s retina, but it also induced a fast and complete stripping-off of the neuron’s dendritic tree. The dendrites are like a tree receiving many thousands of signals from other neurons. This enables them to process visual information and then transmit the signals along the optic nerve towards the brain. By retracting its dendrites, the cell withdraws itself from this intercellular communication network and becomes silent — which helps its survival.

The test animals were divided into groups and subjected to both real and sham treatments. For the rats, optic nerve crush (ONC) was used to induce an injury in some of the animals to mimic glaucoma. Some animals and not others (sham) were treated with rtACS, resulting in three test groups: ONC/rtACS, ONC/Sham, and Sham/Sham. Using in vivo confocal neuroimaging (ICON) and measurements of Visual Evoked Potentials (VEP), the researchers could determine whether a neuron had survived and whether it was still functioning. The ONC and the first rtACS stimulation were done on day zero. ICON was performed on day 4, followed by rtACS or sham stimulation. On day 7 post ONC another ICON was performed.

For the mice, a confocal laser ophthalmoscope was used to image the dendritic structures of the retina for three groups of subjects, ONC/rtACS, ONC/Sham and Sham/rtACS. The mice received rtACS on days 0, 3, 6, 9 and 12 after ONC and images were taken on days 3, 7 and 14.

According to lead author Petra Henrich-Noack, PhD, Institute of Medical Psychology, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany, “With our experiments, we have detected so far unknown ‘silent survivor cells’ in the brain and it will be exciting to find out whether they later die or can be reactivated.” Surprisingly, neurons in the retina of animals that survived better when treated with rtACS lost their dendritic tree completely within the first 3 days after the lesion. The authors suggest that this early structural isolation might protect the neurons from the “toxic” excitation that is known to appear soon after brain damage.

 

 

Story Source:

Materials provided by Institute for Medical Psychology, Otto-v.-Guericke University Magdeburg. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Petra Henrich-Noack, Elena G. Sergeeva, Torben Eber, Qing You, Nadine Voigt, Jürgen Köhler, Sebastian Wagner, Stefanie Lazik, Christian Mawrin, Guihua Xu, Sayantan Biswas, Bernhard A. Sabel, Christopher Kai-Shun Leung. Electrical brain stimulation induces dendritic stripping but improves survival of silent neurons after optic nerve damage. Scientific Reports, 2017; 7 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-00487-z

 

 

Thinking Positive Goes a Long Way

by Leave a Comment

[huge_it_share]TBI-PostWP_large

Ever since my accident on August 13th, 2012, I look at things/events in my life in a whole different way. Positive Thinking is what I use all the time, so much so; it grew into a habit. An example of this ‘Positive Thinking’ is from when I was in my coma and how I thought, Whatever kind of state I am in now, it will get better, I will be back to normal once again’.

Okay, okay, that is an extreme example, ‘positive thinking’, could work in your life even for more, ‘simple’ occurrences/things. Even to the point when you get a small cut that looks like it will take a long time to heal. You then focusing your attention on the cut, and thinking “This will heal soon,” will likely heal the wound faster than normally, rather than ignoring the wound right after getting it.

I have always believed in the principle ‘Positive Thoughts, Positive Results’. This theory has almost never let me down before. Most importantly, we have to remember by thinking positively, we are practicing one of the characteristics God has, positive energy.

Thereby, doing as such, brings a multitude of other miraculous gifts into your life, such as, a miraculous peace, an increased amount of energy, among a plethora of others.