Background: Diffuse axonal injury (DAI) is one of the most common and important pathologic features of traumatic brain injury (TBI). The susceptibility of axons to mechanical injury appears to be due to both their viscoelastic properties and their high organization in white matter tracts. Although axons are supple under normal conditions, they become brittle when exposed to rapid deformations a...

Diffuse axonal injury (DAI) as defined by detailed microscopic examination was found in 34 of 80 consecutive cases of head trauma surviving for a sufficient length of time to be clinically assessed by the Royal Adelaide Hospital Neurosurgery Unit. The findings indicate that there is a spectrum of axonal injury and that one third of cases of DAI recovered sufficiently to talk between the initial...

Diffuse axonal injury (DAI) remains a prominent feature of human traumatic brain injury (TBI) and a major player in its subsequent morbidity. The importance of this widespread axonal damage has been confirmed by multiple approaches including routine postmortem neuropathology as well as advanced imaging, which is now capable of detecting the signatures of traumatically induced axonal injury acro...

DAI is a leading cause of the patient's death or lasting vegetable state following severe TBI, and up to now the detailed mechanism of axonal injury after head trauma is still unclear. Inflammatory responses have been proved to be an important mechanism of neural injury after TBI. However, most of these studies are concerned with focal cerebral injury following head trauma. In contrast to focal...

BACKGROUND The results of recent studies on cognitive disability after traumatic brain injury-associated diffuse axonal injury (DAI) are inconsistent. In these studies, the diagnosis of DAI relied on cranial computed tomography. OBJECTIVE To further clarify the extent and severity of a possibly DAI-associated cognitive impairment by the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and detailed neu...

CASE REPORT To describe a case of combined bilateral cranial nerve palsy of traumatic origin. To determine the lesions that produce the symptoms is useful to define the final prognosis and the best treatment. DISCUSSION We report the case of a patient who developed a bilateral sixth nerve and left third nerve palsy after head trauma. The underlying lesion was a diffuse axonal injury. After an...

Magnetic resonance imaging provides evidence for loss of both white and grey matter, in terms of tissue volume, from the cerebral hemispheres after traumatic brain injury. However, quantitative histopathological data are lacking. From the archive of the Department of Neuropathology at Glasgow, the cerebral cortex of 48 patients was investigated using stereology. Patients had survived 3 months a...

There are very few reports in the literature dealing with the neuropathology of infant head injury, and the question of whether diffuse traumatic brain damage [diffuse axonal injury (DAI)] occurs in such children has not yet been reliably established by detailed neuropathological studies. We report the findings in the brains of a series of 37 infants aged 9 months or less, all of whom died from...