Asking because i always hear the phrase “oh they must’ve been dropped on their head as a kid” in response to someone doing something weird or dumb. My sister got dropped on her head on concrete, had a bad concussion, and turned out fine, and I got a major concussion as a 1 year old due to a parking lot mugging and have some issues that are unexplainable by doctors except for that incident. I’m just wondering if the likelihood of long term damage is significant enough to warrant a household phrase.
In: Biology
[An amazing talk about exactly that](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=esPRsT-lmw8) the brain scans he shows are amazingly interesting 😀
In short, if it was very early, it might have impact without anyone noticing, because the brain adapts, so its not immediately recognizable.
Edit: keep in mind: hes a doctor. So he encounters mostly people that already have a problem. The ones that dont have a problem but have fallen on their heads don’t go to him, so there is a bias.
babies have soft plates in their skull to allow for their brain to grow. It hardens into solid skull as they get older. So from a strictly anatomical point of view, very young kids’ brains have less protection than adults, and may be more susceptible to injury. How that translates into actual long term risk, I don’t know.
We’ve clearly linked childhood trauma (in abusive situations) to lower cognitive functions in adults. We now understand this to be more about children being unable to learn in stressful environments but before such research it was commonly believed they suffered too much head trauma.
Like most things, it depends.
The vast majority of the time, there’s no damage in the short or long term damage to the brain.
But, sometimes there is enough damage to the right parts to the brain to have a long term impact.
It’s certainly not common enough to warrant a household phrase.
If you fell down on your head once when you were a kid and you didn’t have a massive brain bleed and internal brain damage, just a bump without ~~and a little~~ concussion, it’s “fine”, it won’t fuck you up for later on.
But repeated head trauma, such as in boxers, can cause early onsets dementia/alzheimer’s years after. I think the theory is that repeated trauma causes a inflammation that never goes away and triggers the onset of the progressive neuronal death.
Edit : Apparently even one severe concussion is enough [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(18)30065-8/fulltext](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(18)30065-8/fulltext)
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