"And those veins stretch, and you'll get tearing in those veins," says Dr. Researchers say if you simply bump your head on the eaves of your attic, as Arling did, or if you simply start to fall and then catch yourself - so your head doesn't strike anything, but it jerks in the air - that can be enough force to jostle your shrinking brain. So as your brain pulls away, some of those veins become more exposed and more vulnerable. But the veins keep holding on to both the dura and the brain. Studies suggest that as you get older, your brain shrinks and pulls away from the dura, especially after you're 60 or 70 years old.
Inside the dura, there's a network of veins that connect it to the surface of the brain.īrain specialists say you should see a doctor if you develop these symptoms: The brain is wrapped and protected by a membrane called the dura mater. To understand why, it helps to picture an aging brain.
The main population at risk for a subdural hematoma is the elderly. It's also different from the usual football concussions, in which blows to the head damage the brain's electrical wiring. In those cases, shock waves rattled their brains and caused microscopic damage that's hard or impossible to detect. But Arling got a kind of brain injury that's usually more insidious - a subdural hematoma.Ī subdural hematoma is different from the typical blast injuries that affected hundreds of thousands of U.S. But he didn't even get a cut, so he forgot about it.Įverybody knows you can get hurt if you fall off a ladder, or slip and bash your head on the ice. Then, just as they were wheeling him into the operating room, Arling remembered: The day he stood up in the attic and threw out his back, he had forgotten he was under the eaves, and had knocked the top of his head against a wood beam. "And I said, 'I haven't fallen,' " Arling says. Weeks went by, and his back was still hurting him. He took painkillers and went back to work. "But it was more intense than I've ever had it before." "It's a pain I've had before," says Arling, who has battled back problems for years. He then felt a shooting pain in the center of his back. After an hour of searching, he found the files in a box, grabbed the folders and stood up.
It was jammed with boxes of Christmas tree ornaments, old clothes and other odds and ends that define decades of family life. Last spring, Arling went looking for some files in his walk-up attic. So it's ironic that the brain injury he failed to diagnose was his own. His peers often vote to put him on those lists of "top doctors," published by glossy magazines. One such doctor is Bryan Arling, an internist in Washington, D.C. Yet they and even their doctors often don't know it. get potentially serious brain injuries every year, too. Researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in the U.S. It's not just football players or troops who fought in the wars who suffer from brain injuries.
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