CDC has a wealth of information about concussion symptoms and their treatment.
Click HERE for to check CDC’s webpage about concussion.
Below is some general information about what may be causing various symptoms after a traumatic brain injury and what are some general recommendations on how to treat them in the short term. If you have severe symptoms, or if you have persistent mild concussion symptoms that are not improving within a few days, you need to see your doctor.
Emotional Symptoms:
The frontal lobe of our brain plays a major role in emotion regulation, personality, and impulse control. If damage occurs to this area, you may experience impulsive behavior, anger, sadness, or anxiety.
- Treatment:If your symptoms are not getting better within a few days, you need to discuss them with your doctor. You may need to see a therapist, exercise more, take some time off from school or work, or focus on improving your sleep.
Cognitive Symptoms:
Brain injuries can damage the areas of your brain that oversee taking in and storing information, which in turn affects your memory. After a concussion, you may have trouble focusing, paying attention, communicating, and processing information. This may be in part due to a breakdown in the brain’s communication pathways.
- Treatment: In the short term, you need to make lists, decrease distractions, stick to a routine, and allow yourself plenty of rest. If your difficulty with reading and remembering things are worse in busy environment, you may need to take some time off from work or school. If your symptoms are not improving within a couple of weeks, you need to discuss them with your doctor.
Trouble with Sleep and Feeling Tired:
Sleep is vital in maintaining brain health, storing the day’s memories, and repairing the brain’s pathways after an injury. It is unclear why concussion causes difficulty falling sleep in some patients while other patients may need to sleep a lot more than usual.
- Treatment:If you have trouble falling sleep, you can start by following standard recommendations for sleep hygiene. These include making sure your bedroom is dark, comfortable, and quiet, avoiding caffeinated beverages before bedtime, and keeping a consistent bedtime routine. If you are not improving in a couple of weeks or if you feel you need a lot more sleep than usual, you need to talk to your doctor.
Headaches:
A classic symptom of concussion, headaches can affect your daily life at home, school, or work. Post-concussion headaches are often associated with sensitivity to light or sound, irritability, nausea, or difficulty focusing. What causes post-concussion headache, which is quite similar to migraine, is not known.
- Treatment: A few nights of sleep, rest, and avoiding triggers for your headaches, should help to reduce your symptoms greatly. If they persist, however, you need to see your doctor and ask for referral to see a neurologist. Treatment of headaches depends largely on the underlying cause of the headache. If you are experiencing consistent headaches see your doctor.
Neurological issues such as double vision, persistent difficulty with balance and coordination, severe difficulty reading or understanding of what you read, vertigo, confusion, and unusual emotional issues require expertise of a neurologist, a psychiatrist, and/or a primary care physician who has expertise in treating patients with concussion.
Warning Signs of a Serious Concussion;
Most patients with a minor concussion may have symptoms such as headache, fatigue, or difficulty thinking clearly for a few hours or a couple of days. For example, a teenager who gets hit in the head by another player during a basketball game won’t feel right that day and the following day. But by the third day, she will be back to her usual self. A big question, for which there is no straightforward answer, is when must the coaches have to call 911 or have the child see a doctor in the local emergency room?
In rare cases, and mostly in situations such as soldiers injured in battle fields or in patients involved in major car crashes or falls, the trauma to the head causes a bleed in the brain.
The internal blood collection can be the size of a ping-pong ball or the size of an orange. In situations when the hemorrhage in the brain is large, surgeons may have to temporarily remove a portion of the skull so that the swelling and pressure caused by the brain bleed will not kill the patient.
There is no easy way to look at a person and determine if they have had a bleed in their brain or have experienced an injury to their spinal cord. But in severe cases, patients have certain symptoms that are not typically seen in patients with less urgent concussions.
CDC’s guideline for calling 911, or taking a patient to the emergency room immediately, include the presence of any of the symptoms below:
- A headache that is getting worse and is severe
- Inability for the patient to explain what happened, being confused (amnesia)
- Repeated vomiting that is getting worse
- Out of character restlessness, agitation, being violent, or any unusual behavior
- Slow to answer questions, disoriented, or slurred speech
- Weakness in arms or legs, or in one side of the body
- Clumsiness or difficulty walking
- Loss of consciousness or a seizure
Patients with such symptoms need urgent medical attention in an emergency room. A head CT will show the presence of the blood in the brain and then the neurosurgeons can decide if the patient needs to be taken to the operating theater for immediate surgery. Fortunately, most sport-related concussions are not life threatening and patients recover gradually on their own.