Will brain damage show up on an mri?

Transcript:

I’m Taylor Ernst at the Ernst Law Group. Will brain damage show up on an MRI? It’s a question we get asked often by our clients who’ve suffered brain injuries. And the answer is if it’s moderate or severe, most of the time it will show up on an MRI. If it’s a mild brain injury, often it will not show up on an MRI. Why is that? It’s because as the scanner looks through the brain, through the MRI, which is magnetic resonance imaging, certain things won’t show up if they’re too small. It’s like taking a photograph with a really poor camera or a Polaroid something really far away. It doesn’t mean it’s not there. You just can’t really see it because the picture quality isn’t good enough. That’s the problem.

So, what can an MRI see? An MRI can see subarachnoids hemorrhages, bleeding in the brain, old parts of brain damage that where parts of the brain have basically form scarring. That will show up on an MRI often. But if it’s at the very smallest level, which is called Axonify shearing, most of the time that will not show up. And we talk about mild, moderate, severe brain injuries. I’ve had clients who have very severe brain injuries that are able to go back to a fairly normal life and I’ve had clients with mild brain injuries that really have a tough time integrating back into their daily life because their symptoms are so significant.

So, in short, just because there’s an MRI scan that says negative, it doesn’t mean you aren’t going to have symptoms of a traumatic brain injury. That being said, just because you do have a traumatic brain injury, the next question is, is this permanent? I got a video addressing that. And the short answer is, look into neuro-plasticity. There’s lots you can do to try and help your improvement. We aren’t sure how much things will improve, but there’s always hope that you might be able to find something that’ll help rewire your brain and give you some level of improvement.