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Brain Injuries

Non-traumatic brain injury

Brain damage may also be caused by many non-traumatic, or non-head injury events or conditions. The more common ones include:

  • meningitis and encephalitis (infections or inflammation of the brain, see entries)
  • whenever there has been a lack of oxygen to the brain as occurs in: near-drowning accidents; cardiac arrest (heart attacks); asphyxia or suffocation (e.g. inhaling smoke from fires).
  • whenever there has been a lack of glucose to the brain
  • following status epilepticus (in which a tonic-clonic convulsion has lasted for more than forty-five to sixty minutes)

It is also important to understand that many of the physical, educational, emotional and behavioural problems and needs of these children and the methods of rehabilitating (which means 'putting back together again'), them are very similar to those in children who have had brain damage because of a traumatic, head injury.

View Inheritance patterns and prenatal diagnosis Inheritance patterns and prenatal diagnosis  |  Is there support? View Is there support?

Medical text written October 2002 by Mr N Buxton. Last updated June 2007 by Mr N Buxton, Consultant Paediatric Neurosurgeon, Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool, UK. Non-traumatic brain injury text written October 2003 by Dr R Appleton, Consultant Paediatric Neurologist, Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool, UK.

 

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