AIM To establish whether hearing loss after eardrum blast injury could be recovered by tympanoplasty performed immediately after injury and what material is the most suitable for eardrum closure. METHODS Tympanoplasty was performed in 119 (a total of 181 injuries) out of 651 patients examined for blast injury of the ear between 1991 and 2000. The study included a total of 106 patients who und...

Ocular injury is among the most common terrorist blast morbidities, arising in up to 28% of survivors. Secondary blast injury, in which penetrating and perforating foreign body damage arises from flying debris, is a familiar source of ocular tissue disruption, inflammation and infection. Remarkably, however, the nature and extent of ocular injury from the primary blast itself, independent of fl...

Hydrogen sulphide (H2S) was found to attenuate ventilator or oleic acid induced lung injury. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of exogenous H2S donor, sodium Hydrosulphide (NaHS), on lung injury following blast limb trauma and the underlying mechanisms. For in vitro experiments, pulmonary micro-vessel endothelial cells (PMVECs) were cultured and treated with NaHS or vehicle in th...

Civilian blast injuries are not rare, but most are not due to military explosives, meaning extrapolation from military texts is often inappropriate. In civilian mass casualty events, emergency departments will see large patient numbers, but few require surgery or intensive care. Survivors of small civilian blasts rarely have blast wave injury and should be treated according to standard trauma p...

Explosive blasts associated with even mild traumatic brain injury can lead to substantial but delayed visual deficits, even in the absence of overt clinical presentation. There are two major challenges for these patients: lack of sensitivity in diagnostic testing to reveal the visual deficit and a dearth of viable treatment options to restore lost vision. In this issue of IOVS, Dutca et al. ind...

1 of 2 DESCRIPTION A 16-year-old male suicide bomber committed suicide with grenade exploding in his hands. On scene, the patient was found unconscious with bilateral amputations above wrist, was blind from both eyes and had denudation of subcutaneous tissue of the anterior thoracic wall probably from shrapnel. He had Glascow coma scale 6, he was dyspnoeic, cyanotic, hypoxic (oxygen saturation ...

Axonal degeneration is a prominent feature of many forms of neurodegeneration, and also an early event in blast-mediated traumatic brain injury (TBI), the signature injury of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not known, however, whether this axonal degeneration is what drives development of subsequent neurologic deficits after the injury. The Wallerian degeneration slow strain (WldS) of m...

Although advances are being made in identifying some of the essential mechanisms that may lead to chronic neurological deficits after blast-exposure(s), clinical needs continue to exceed current knowledge. In their current article, Brenner and colleagues address the importance of basic science in guiding new diagnostic and treatment strategies. Together with Wilkinson et al., they emphasize one...

Little is known about the visual function deficits associated with polytrauma injury. In this retrospective descriptive study, we examined the records of a clinic established to assess visual function in patients experiencing deployment-related polytrauma. We describe the clinical findings and present a vision examination protocol that may be useful for screening polytrauma patients in other se...

Blast-associated sensory and cognitive trauma sustained by military service members is an area of extensively studied research. Recent studies in our laboratory have revealed that low-level blast exposure increased expression of transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) and endothelin-1 (ET-1), proteins well characterized for their role in mediating pain transmission, in the cornea. Dete...