(Press-News.org) URBANA – A Vietnam veteran who conducted early-morning mine sweeps on that country's roads, University of Illinois nutrition professor John Erdman knows the damage that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) can cause. That's why he was happy to chair a committee that gave the Department of Defense recommendations that will improve the odds of recovery for persons wounded by roadside bombs.
"Within the first 24 hours after head trauma, patients need to receive at least 50 percent of their normal caloric intake, including a higher-than-normal amount of protein, to reduce inflammation and swelling of the brain and give the brain enough energy to repair itself. This regimen should be followed for at least two weeks," he said.
Erdman, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine (IOM), led a committee tasked with providing nutritional recommendations for TBI patients to the U.S. Department of Defense.
The IOM reports that in one estimate 10 to 20 percent of returning veterans have sustained a TBI, with other estimates suggesting that TBIs account for one-third of all combat-related injuries.
But soldiers wounded by roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't the only patients who can benefit from these new guidelines. Victims of brain injuries received in motorcycle and car accidents, football and hockey players who have severe concussions, and even stroke victims need early protein and energy, he said.
"Inflammation, of course, is a particular problem in the brain because there's no room for the swelling; and the secondary effects of inflammation, which include cell death, pressure and hemorrhaging, are unacceptable," he said.
Erdman said the brain uses only glucose for energy and cannot readily draw on fat stores. "This glucose is used up pretty quickly so it's important that it be replaced. Protein is important for its immunological benefits and the role it plays in preventing inflammation," he said.
He noted that wartime victims of TBI often have other injuries that grab a medical professional's attention.
"The first person who arrives on the scene isn't thinking about feeding the wounded person. They're triaging the people who need immediate assistance, and they're stabilizing the soldiers who are severely injured and moving them to a forward base where they can be treated. At some point early on, IV fluids may be given, but they may not contain protein and calories," he said.
The committee was also asked to provide a list of other possible nutritional interventions for enhancing recovery from TBI, and they identified a list of food components that should be researched further. These include the B vitamin choline, the amino acid-like compound creatine, n-3 fatty acids commonly known as EPA and DHA, and zinc as the most promising areas of investigation, he said.
"The Department of Defense was pleased to have the committee's priority list because they need to make good decisions about which studies to fund. They have limited funds," he said.
Defense officials are tremendously interested in increasing the survival rate and speed of recovery of TBI victims and in facilitating their recovery with nutritional interventions, he said.
###
The report, "Nutrition and Traumatic Brain Injury: Improving Acute and Subacute Health Outcomes in Military Personnel," can be viewed at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13121.
END
At the request of customers, software development firm Halfpricesoft has launched the new edition of check printing software to make it easier to print Quickbooks compatible checks.
"We have a strong following of small business customers who love our other time-saving and money-saving software titles." said Dr. Ge, founder of Louisville, Ky.-based Halfpricesoft, "With ezCheckPrinting, check writing and printing software, user never need to re-order the expensive pre-printed checks. And new blank check printing feature makes it even easier to print pre-printed ...
HOUSTON (May 2, 2011) – Colorectal cancer screening rates increased for Medicare beneficiaries when coverage was expanded to average-risk individuals, but racial disparities still exist, according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
"Despite the expansion of Medicare coverage for colorectal cancer screening, disparities persisted among the ethnic groups we examined," said Arica White, Ph.D., M.P.H., former doctoral student at The University of Texas School of Public Health, part of UTHealth. In 1998, Medicare began covering ...
NEW YORK – May 3, 2011 –A study by Columbia Business School Professors Amit Khandelwal, a Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business senior scholar and assistant professor, Finance and Economics, and Shang-Jin Wei, director, Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business, and N.T. Wang Professor of Chinese Business and Economy, Finance and Economics, alongside JaeBin Ahn, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Columbia University, provides the first empirical evidence that quantifies the role of intermediary firms in developing and expanding international trade ...
WASHINGTON, DC (May 3, 2011) – A coalition of 30 leading global health organizations that work on vaccines, drugs, and other tools and technologies that save lives today released a list of recommendations for US policymakers and regulators, calling for acceleration of scientific innovations and streamlining the approval of safe and affordable inventions in order to save more lives around the world.
The Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC), a group funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and designed to give a greater voice for those advancing technologies ...
PHILADELPHIA — Biophysicists at the University of Pennsylvania have helped develop a new technique for studying how proteins respond to physical stress and have applied it to better understand the stability-granting structures in normal and mutated red blood cells.
The research was conducted by Dennis Discher and Christine Krieger in the Molecular and Cell Biophysics Lab in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, along with researchers from the New York Blood Center and the Wistar Institute.
Discher's research was published online in the journal Proceedings ...
HOUSTON -- (May 3, 2011) -- A Rice University-led team of physicists this week offered up one of the first theoretical explanations of how two dissimilar types of high-temperature superconductors behave in similar ways.
The research appears online this week in the journal Physical Review Letters. It describes how the magnetic properties of electrons in two dissimilar families of iron-based materials called "pnictides" (pronounced: NICK-tides) could give rise to superconductivity. One of the parent families of pnictides is a metal and was discovered in 2008; the other ...
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT chemical engineers have designed a new type of drug-delivery nanoparticle that exploits a trait shared by almost all tumors: They are more acidic than healthy tissues.
Such particles could target nearly any type of tumor, and can be designed to carry virtually any type of drug, says Paula Hammond, a member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the particles in the journal ACS Nano.
Like most other drug-delivering nanoparticles, the new MIT particles are cloaked in a polymer ...
Ecstasy – the illegal "rave" drug that produces feelings of euphoria and emotional warmth – has been in the news recently as a potential therapeutic. Clinical trials are testing Ecstasy in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
But headlines like one in Time magazine's health section in February – "Ecstasy as therapy: have some of its negative effects been overblown?" – concern Ronald Cowan, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Psychiatry.
His team reports in the May issue of Neuropsychopharmacology that recreational Ecstasy use is associated with a chronic ...
Boston, MA – A common component in webcams may help drug makers and prescribers address a common side-effect of drugs called cardiotoxicity, an unhealthy change in the way the heart beats. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have used the basic webcam technology to create a tool to look at the effects of medications in real time on heart cells, called cardiomyocytes. These findings were published in the journal, Lab on a Chip on April 11, 2011.
Researchers developed a cost-effective, portable cell-based biosensor for real time cardiotoxicity detection using ...
An ancient, bipedal hominid needs a new nickname. Paranthropus boisei, a 2.3 million to 1.2 million-year-old primate, whom researchers say is an early human cousin, probably didn't crack nuts at all as his common handle suggests.
"Nutcracker Man" most likely ate grass and possibly sedges, said geochemist Thure Cerling, lead author of a study published in the May 2 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Cerling and colleagues determined P. boisei's diet by analyzing carbon isotope ratios in the tooth enamel of 24 teeth from 22 ...
