EEG

[makgarey]

I am a United States Marine Corps Veteran that has been discharged honorably. Within the last year I have been having issues relating to memory loss and flash backs including intrusive thoughts. I have been visiting with my Primary Care Provider at the Truman Memorial hospital in Columbia, MO, and am now schedueld for an EEG examination. My question is concerning what exactly would the Nerologist be looking for with an EEG result, being that I have been Diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury.

[ggreg]

Dear Makgarey,
Thank you for your service with the Marine Corps.  Here's some more stuff for you about EEGs.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003931.htm

The above link will tell you all about EEGs, too.  Usually if a person has a head injury, the doctors are going to run an EEG test to measure the brain's electrical impulses, like alpha and delta waves.  The doctors want to see how well the brain is functioning with the injury, it helps them evaluate the injury, it shows if one side of the brain is doing better than the other, it can confirm if abnormalities are coming from the brain or are from a mental health problem, it helps determine the amount of recovery from injury that can be expected, and it can detect epilepsy which is an altered state of being that can cause a person to lose consciousness and seize up.  

About 2,000 soldiers from the war in Iraq have suffered brain injury from IEDs.  As you know, the television anchor Bob Woodruff had a TBI when he was in Iraq, and he and his wife wrote a book about it, so reading that might familiarize you with what's going on.  He continues to function at a very high level, he does TV specials relating to the effects of war injury.  The below link lists a bunch of books, including Woodruff's, that write about brain injuries.

http://www.lapublishing.com/Books-on-Adults.4.0.0.1.htm

You mentioned flashbacks.  I used to work for newspapers, and I interviewed a director of psychiatry at the VA, and he talked about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is a condition that many soldiers have from the war experience, where they are mentally disabled by scary stuff that happened in battle, and they relive situations when triggered by noises or visual clues.  This is a treatable condition.  I have panic disorder from a car wreck, so cars are my trigger.  Took me a year of therapy and medication to get back in a car.  And my injuries, when they flare up, also cause waves of unsettling thoughts to visit on me.  But since I can make the logical connection between source and reaction, they are much easier to handle.

You could probably do a Google search for PTSD and find more info on soldiers like you, who have had some pretty wild experiences on account of the terrible conditions of war, which follow them home.  I remember one Vietnam Vet I read about, who said if someone cut him off on the freeway, "Then he would have a really BIG problem with me."  Support groups may be available in your area with the VA, where you can talk openly with other military people about what you're dealing with.  I have also heard that spending time in a swimming pool, and even acupuncture, will help traumatized people relax.  
GG

[DrKalraMD]

Hi, here are some possibilities, taken from website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography

•to distinguish epileptic seizures from other types of spells, such as psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, syncope (fainting), sub-cortical movement disorders and migraine variants.
•to characterize seizures for the purposes of treatment
•to localize the region of brain from which a seizure originates for work-up of possible seizure surgery
•to monitor for non-convulsive seizures/non-convulsive status epilepticus
•to differentiate "organic" encephalopathy or delirium from primary psychiatric syndromes such as catatonia