Target Shooting and Brain Injury: Admissions about Forces and Individual Variability
I read an interesting article in The New York Times: Target Shooting Could Be Causing Brain Injuries.
The part about target shooting was interesting. But what really caught my attention was that it confirmed what many “experts” on the defense side deny: neuro-disruption that doesn't cause concussive symptoms can still cause brain injury.
But there was more to it than just acknowledging the significance of these sub-concussive events.
The article confirmed that neurologists don’t know how much change in velocity, acceleration, etc. it takes to injure the brain and, even if they did have an “average” measurement, there is so much individual variability that it would be meaningless.
Here are some of the significant take-aways:
The brain is a delicate network of about 100 trillion connections with a consistency close to Jell-O. Experts don’t know what level of exposure is "safe" or whether blasts that are safe in limited numbers can cause harm with repeated exposure.
Repeated small exposures may cause damage that accumulates unnoticed. A researcher compared the stress put on neurons to what happens to a well-used rubber band. “Stretch a rubber band a hundred times and it bounces back, but there are micro tears forming,” he said. “The hundred-and-first time, it breaks.”
One person may feel fine after shooting, and another may feel concussed, because not everyone is affected in the same way. Age, fitness level, prior history of contact sports, pre-existing brain injuries and other factors may all make some people more vulnerable than others.
Some defense experts give exact values below which brain injury cannot occur. What they're trying to do is stretch data from studies about high school and college football players about what impacts most frequently caused concussions.
Maybe it’s not going to happen this year. Or next year. But at some point in the not too distant future society is going to look back on these defense witnesses experts as ignorant, corrupt or both. They'll be viewed with the same distain as the doctors who testified for the tobacco companies that cigarette smoking didn’t cause cancer.