REHABILITATION RECOVERY KEY

There were three collisions that first day of summer in 1986 when Jeff Harms rolled his Corvette.

"The car flipped, the people inside crashed into the car and my organs began ricocheting off my body," he said.

Harms sustained damage to his frontal lobe and to his brain stem.

Dr. Basit Chaudhari, a Cape Girardeau neurologist who treats Jeff Harms and his wife Kim, says rehabilitation is the primary hope for victims of traumatic brain injury.

"If it is a young individual, there is quite a lot of training process to go through. Sometimes it can compensate almost 100 percent."

Younger victims have better chances of recovery because they haven't already lost brain tissue to aging.

The brain cannot regenerate tissue that has been damaged, but redundant nerve cells can take over functions for cells that have been damaged.

The frontal lobe is the most common area to sustain brain injury. Judgment, language and problem-solving are its areas of control.

The temporal lobes control memory, the parietal lobes dictate writing, math and reading ability, and the occipital lobes control visual perception.

Physicians have ways to lessen the extent of brain injuries. Medications can control swelling in the brain, and control of blood pressure has beneficial effects.

Jeff Harms is investigating the use of Cognex, a drug which shows signs of alleviating some of the memory loss associated with Alzheimer's disease.

"There is potential for its use," Chaudhari says.

The difference between the two conditions is that trauma imparts structural damage to cells quickly while the damage occurs slowly with Alzheimer's disease.

"Eventually, the result may be just the same," Chaudhari says.

For more information about traumatic brain injury, phone the Brain Injury Association at (202) 296-6443 or (800) 444-6443.