Team of Scientists Investigate Invisible War Wounds
Researchers with the Army Research Laboratory’s Explosive Technology Branch are working to investigate the long- and short-term effects of blast-induced mild traumatic brain injury, which has become increasingly prevalent in recent military conflicts.
Thuvan Piehler, a research chemist said her team’s critical experiments and data collection reveal brain damage thresholds necessary to develop, refine and test protective equipment, according to a release on the U.S. Department of Defense website.
“For mild traumatic brain injury there is currently no treatment available, so we need to assess the mechanism of injury to find out how we can mitigate it,” Piehler said in the article.
The lab’s team of physicists, engineers and chemists has taken a multi-scale approach to leverage unique explosive testing capabilities that closely resemble actual circumstances the warfighter might experience.
“The experiments use smaller explosives and offer cost-conscious, repeatable parameters to attain more reliable data and to complement strides made by the Veterans Affairs Department and the medical and academic communities,” the article reads. “When you use a smaller explosive, the duration will be different, but the advantage is that we can see similar impact compared to the big scale.”
Piehler stressed taking an approach to assess low-pressure impact as key components of brain cells change through morphology or impact response.
“That may lead to damage
Clinical data suggests that many warfighters diagnosed with mild TBI, or MTBI, sometimes did not present symptoms for years after a blast, so understanding, protection and treatment will be long-term goals of the team.
Experimental parameters require analysis of a brain injury about 24-48 hours following a blast. This allows the researchers to look at individual brain cells.
Scientists also assess different outcome measures such as changes in morphology, swelling and edema to correlate experimental data to human data and disseminate those findings to the medical community. Ultimately scientists hope to utilize the technology to better test current equipment and understand whether or not it’s suitable for the environment a warfighter may be exposed to.
