KPLU Local News
(2010-05-19)
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Photo courtesy JAMA
A major study conducted at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center finds high rates of major depression among people with head injuries.
You may hear a lot about traumatic brain injury these days because it's affected so many soldiers and Marines. But, you'll also find plenty of head injuries in local hospital emergency rooms--most of them from car or motorcycle crashes, or falls. Brain injuries typically affects physical coordination and thinking, but the emotional side has been largely ignored.
"We saw this as a problem clinically that wasn't being addressed systematically," says psychologist Charles Bombardier.
He and his colleagues at the University of Washington studied 559 brain injury patients at Harborview hospital. They checked in with them every month or two, after discharge, for a year. They found more than half (53%) suffered from major depression for at least two weeks (many of them for several months).
Depression rates surprising, probably related to physical changes
"We thought 'Whoa, what are we going to do with this?' It seemed way too high. So, that was really surprising," says Bombardier.
A surprisingly high percentage of patients, 43%, also had a prior history of depression. That confirms other studies that show people with depression are more likely to injure themselves. But, even people who had no prior history of depression or substance abuse had rates of depression six times higher than in the general public. The study is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association .
Bombardier says it's not just about mood. The depression is probably triggered by biological damage. What's more, depression makes all the typical symptoms of brain injury worse: More anger, more cognitive challenges, worse overall health, and more suicide attempts.
He hopes this study will persuade all doctors who deal with head injury to start looking for ways to treat the depression along with everything else.
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The following video, featuring Charles Bombardier and his research, was produced by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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