Research into a blood-based test for brain injuries started over a decade ago with funding from the\u00a0U.S. Department of Defense<\/a>,\u00a0which was looking for a way to diagnose traumatic brain injuries in the field.<\/p>\n The technology also can be useful for youth athletics, and officials at Abbott said they were currently having clinical trials for the test focused on children under 18. Last year,\u00a0the motorcycle racing organization, MotoAmerica, became\u00a0the first professional sports organization<\/a> to use the test on-site.<\/p>\n At North Shore, many of their patients with possible traumatic brain injury are\u00a0senior citizens\u00a0who have fallen.<\/p>\n “One of the most common causes for people to come to the emergency department is a mild traumatic brain injury,” Iloabachie said. “We would define it as a blunt force trauma event where something hits your head or your head hits something.”<\/p>\n Clinicians use the Glasgow Coma Scale<\/a>,\u00a0which measures speech, eye opening and motor response as a first level of evaluation. If that response is high enough, then the head injury is determined to be mild and the blood test can be used.<\/p>\n “Even\u00a0when those algorithms are followed, we still perform head CTs on an exorbitant number of these patients with mild traumatic brain injuries,” Iloabachie said. “The overwhelming majority of these CT scans are negative so it begs the question if they are even necessary to do in the first place.”<\/p>\n He pointed out each CT scan exposes patients to ionizing radiation, costs money to be performed and read by a radiologist and adds time to an emergency department stay.<\/p>\n There are a few caveats for the blood test. Patients must be tested within the first 24 hours of their injury, cannot be on blood thinners, have seizures or have penetrating trauma, such as a gunshot wound or a stab wound.<\/p>\n So far, North Shore has run 135 tests on patients and avoided CT scans on about one-third of them, officials said.<\/p>\n “The test cannot replace a CT scan, that’s a really high bar,” Chang said. “But what it can do is in the right patient population, we can say, ‘You don’t need a CT scan.’ “<\/p>\n According to the Department of Defense, members of the U.S. military suffered\u00a0over 436,000 traumatic brain injuries<\/a> classified as mild between 2000 and 2025.<\/p>\n
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