Traumatic brain injury

Abstract

Traumatic brain injury is one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. It is an extremely heterogenous condition with respect to mechanism, pathophysiology, injury pattern, and investigation findings, with highly variable outcomes, posing a significant challenge to clinicians treating it. Essential to the management of traumatic brain injury is an integrated, multidisciplinary approach from rapid resuscitation and early intervention through to rehabilitation. The pathophysiology can be divided into primary and secondary injury, where primary represents the injury at the point of trauma and secondary the progression of injury due to a cascade of downstream events occurring as a consequence of the primary injury and subsequent physiological insults.