March is Brain Injury Awareness Month in the United States: a time to draw attention to preventing traumatic brain injury (TBI) and to improving life for people living with one, and for their families.
What a TBI is
A traumatic brain injury is caused by a blow or jolt to the head or body, or by something penetrating the head. Millions of people in the United States have one every year.
Falls are one of the leading causes, and older adults are at greater risk both of suffering a TBI and of coming to harm from it.
A rising toll
A CDC report published alongside this notice found that the rate of deaths from fall-related TBI rose 17% nationwide between 2008 and 2017, with increases in most states. The steepest rise was among people aged 75 and older.
Preventing the fall
Because falls drive so much of the burden, preventing them is one of the most direct ways to reduce brain injury in older adults. CDC's STEADI initiative — Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths & Injuries (cdc.gov/steadi) — gives health care providers tools to:
- identify patients at risk of falling, and
- reduce that risk with proven strategies, cutting fall injuries including TBI.
Sources
Written from "Brain Injury Awareness Month — March 2020," Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69(9), CDC; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It cites CDC's 2019 surveillance report on TBI (2014 data), Taylor and others (2017), and Peterson and Kegler (2020), the report on fall-related TBI deaths, 2008–2017.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.cdc.gov
1
0
0
0
Comments
