Head injury (or traumatic brain injury) can be caused by any significant blow, jolt or force that is applied to the head or body or from an object that pierces the skull and enters a person’s brain. Head injury research seeks to gain basic knowledge about the function of the brain and nervous system to identify how to reduce the burden of brain injury and to prevent neurological disease.
Although there has been progress made in this area in recent years, there is still a lack of comprehensive understanding of what happens to the brain when it suffers a traumatic injury and which treatments can make a measurable and effective improvement afterwards. Key challenges facing medical researchers are that each injury has a unique set of circumstances associated with it which depend on the location and severity of an injury, are impacted by a person’s age and health and will be affected by the speed with which treatment is initiated.