Week 10: Implications of TBI and reflection
Shriya S -
Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog! In this post, which marks week 10 of this experience, I will share the implications of TBI and some of my reflections.
Implications of TBI
As a debilitating brain injury with complications including seizures, physical disability, and psychiatric disorders, Traumatic brain injury has several implications–societal and medicinal. Immediate problems post-injury involve blood clots, strokes, and coma. In the long-term, though, along with the worsening of patients’ motor and sensory skills, their mental health can be impacted too. It is not uncommon to see TBI patients develop depression, anxiety, or psychosis after injury.
Along with these physical symptoms, there are also important societal implications of TBI to consider. It can be an ostracizing disease, with TBI patients often claiming they feel “out of place” or uncomfortable with other people. With long-term health challenges associated with TBI also come challenges to independent living, relationships, and employment. As TBI patients are weighed down by medical costs the loss of productivity/wages, economic burden is an important factor to consider. Unfortunately, the distribution of TBI risk and burden is not equal, with vulnerable populations (e.g., low income, low education, minority groups) being disproportionately impacted. In fact, victims of domestic violence are often impacted, even though domestic-violence-related TBI is often overlooked today.
Sadly, despite of these difficulties, TBI remains a prevalent condition, especially in the sports realm and the military. Approximately 300000 sports-related TBI deaths are reported annually in the US, and around 67% of military veterans in the US have experienced at least one TBI.
Finding therapeutic treatments through research and raising awareness not only about sports/military-related TBI but also domestic-violence related TBI are essential steps society can take to promote understanding, empathy, and inclusivity.
Reflection
This research process has taught me so much about not only TBI and research, but also science in general: from practical lab skills (pipetting properly, being meticulous in research, controlling for variables…) to demonstrating the uncertainty of science–the idea that research raises more questions than it answers. There were a few outliers in my data, such as the staining intensity unexpectedly increasing as the secondary concentration decreased, or a few optimal concentrations surprisingly being at the highest primary concentration (usually, the highest tested primary concentration resulted in high background noise, worsening the overall final score). But, these deviations from the pattern serve to highlight that there is something we do not understand in the commonly used data analysis method of immunohistochemistry (IHC). Increasing this understanding through further questions and research will only facilitate TBI research and improve the development of its treatments.
As I’ve mentioned before, this research process also taught me a lot about the mutual inclusivity of empathy and research. Before this experience, I believed the diminishing of that empathy was essential for controlled, sterile, and meticulous literature (I thought I had to become a robot to be a researcher). But, this experience taught me that empathy and research can be not only mutually inclusive but also mutually reinforcing. Empathy is the intrinsic emotion that drives the researcher to start and continue the process. And research reciprocates that by portraying the results of empathy and diligence, by providing a deeper understanding of the research topic. Though, it is important to acknowledge the existence of emotional burnout, yet these researchers have been contributing to science for decades on end. At least at the lab I was in and the people I conversed with, compassion and empathy were pervasive, something I found quite reassuring (I am definitely considering research as a career choice now…but let’s see!).
Concluding remarks
I hope you were able to learn something new by following me along this wonderful journey. Even if you were unable to comprehend every single technical aspect of immunohistochemistry or TBI pathology, I hope you understood the general idea of TBI pathology and IHC, my research, and the pervading implications of TBI. Thank you so much for following along.
And, of course, I am extremely grateful to Ms. Pressman and Dr. Goodwin for helping me throughout this whole process. Thank you! 🙂
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