Brain Injury Center Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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What is a head injury?




What is a concussion?


What is a contusion?


What is a skull fracture?

A skull fracture is a break in the skull bone. There are four major types of skull fractures, including the following: Linear skull fractures - This type accounts for almost 70 percent of skull fractures. In a linear fracture, there is a break in the bone, but it does not move the bone. These children are usually observed in the hospital for a brief amount of time, and can usually resume normal activities in a few days. No interventions are usually necessary.




What causes a head injury?


What causes bruising and internal damage to the brain?


What are the symptoms of a head injury?

  • mild head injury
    • raised, swollen area from a bump or a bruise at the site of the blow
    • small, superficial (shallow) cut in the scalp
    • headache
  • sensitivity to noise and light
  • irritability
  • confusion
  • lightheadedness and/or dizziness
  • problems with balance
  • nausea
  • problems with memory and/or concentration
  • change in sleep patterns
  • blurred vision
  • "tired" eyes
  • ringing in the ears (tinnitus)
  • alteration in taste
  • fatigue/lethergy
    • loss of consciousness
    • severe headache that does not go away
    • repeated nausea and vomiting
    • slurred speech
    • difficulty walking
    • weakness in one side or area of the body
    • sweating
    • pale in color
    • seizures or convulsions
    • behavior changes
    • blood or clear fluid draining from the ears or nose
    • one pupil (dark area in the center of eye) looks larger than the other eye
    • deep cut or laceration in the scalp
    • open would in head (the scalp contains many blood vessels and a cut or laceration due to trauma can be associated with substantional bleeding or blood loss.)
    • foreign object penetrating head

How are head injuries diagnosed?


Learn more about head injuries.




A recent flurry of media attention about concussions has heightened awareness about their potentially serious short- and long-term effects—and raised concerns in young athletes, their parents and coaches. Bill Meehan, MD, primary care Sports Medicine fellow at Boston Children's Hospital's concussion clinic, discusses the topic.

What causes a concussion?
Concussions are mild traumatic brain injuries that occur after a rapid acceleration of the brain. This typically happens when a person is struck in the head, but it can also occur if an athlete is hit on the facemask or chest, causing the head to snap forward or backward.

What are the symptoms of a concussion?
Symptoms include headaches, nausea, vomiting and a sense of being out-of-it or feeling foggy. Most young athletes don't recognize their symptoms as a concussion. Parents can look for signs, like their child being slow to respond verbally, being off-balance and looking spaced-out or glassy-eyed. The bottom line is if you suspect your child has a concussion, he or she should see a doctor. It's critical that patients are evaluated after sustaining a concussion. It's very important that the patient isn't cleared to return to sports until normal brain function has returned—which we can assess through neurological testing—since a second concussion is more likely and, in rare cases, can be fatal.

Is there genuine cause for worry?
Most kids, if their concussions are managed properly and they don't go back into risky situations until they're recovered, will be fine. Typically, children fully recover from a sports-related concussion within 10 days and will regain normal brain function and do just as well at sports and school as they always did. However, some patients take months to recover completely, and children who get a second concussion before fully recovering from the first are at risk for serious, long-term problems.

What are the long-term problems?
The most common long-term problem is delayed or incomplete recovery. This can be seen after multiple concussions, or recurrent concussions, occurring prior to complete recovery from a previous concussion. Some rare situations get a lot of media attention, like second impact syndrome. This happens when a person isn't completely recovered from his first concussion and gets struck in the head again. For reasons we don't understand, they can get massive brain swelling. These patients die or live in a vegetative state.

Recently something called chronic traumatic encephalopathy has been described in pro athletes, like wrestlers and football players, who had multiple concussions and went on to have difficulty later in life with depression, memory and daily living activities. Biopsies revealed changes in their brains similar to Alzheimer's disease. The theory is that these concussions caused changes in their brains that altered their personalities and recognition. It’s brand new information and there are only a handful of cases, so there may be other things these athletes have in common in addition to concussions.

Who is at the greatest risk for long-term problems?
People who have already sustained a concussion are at greater risk for subsequent concussions. The effects are likely cumulative, so each causes more severe symptoms and requires longer recovery times. If a child has just one concussion, we probably won’t see a detectable change in his cognitive abilities. If he has multiple concussions, we often detect long-term changes in his abilities. Nobody knows what the magic number is when you start to see a long-term effect. Some say two, but we’ve treated athletes who've had five or six concussions and have seen no measurable difference.

How can you decrease the risk of getting a concussion?
Proper recovery from previous concussion is the best thing you can do. The other thing you can do is neck-strengthening exercises, which can help keep the head from snapping backward or forward during impact.

Do helmets help prevent concussions?
No, they weren't designed for that purpose. They are made to prevent catastrophic brain injury—which they're very effective at—so every athlete should have a new, properly fitted, undamaged helmet. But they won't decrease risk of concussion. Mouth guards have been proposed as decreasing concussion risk, but they don’t help either. Everyone should still wear them because they go a long way in preventing maxillofacial trauma, but they aren’t related to concussion risk.

How do you diagnose a concussion?
We take an athlete's history, conduct a physical examination, perform a standardized balance assessment and use computerized neuropsychological testing. Ideally, he'll have had a baseline test taken prior to his injury that we can use for comparison. That way we can test him until his scores match where they were before. We offer this baseline neuropsychological testing at Boston Children's and absolutely recommend parents get their child tested if he or she plays a high-risk sport, like ice hokey, football, rugby or soccer.

What's the treatment?
Physical and cognitive rest is the main treatment. We remove the child from athletics and other aerobic activity, then monitor his progress during his recovery, the length of which depends on the type of symptoms and number of his previous concussions. Other times, we treat symptoms with drug therapy. Before putting him back into contact sports, we repeat neuropsychological testing. If needed, we may refer patients to our Brain Injury Center.

How do you know when a child is recovered?
Typically, it takes 10 days to four weeks, but some never recover. That's rare, and those people tend to have multiple concussions or one due to a major force, like sledding into a tree or being in a car accident. If we have a child’s baseline neurological work-up taken before his injury, we know what his brain is capable of and know when he's back to baseline.

Learn more about concussions.

Make an appointment or request a second opinion: 617-355-8597


Concussions and The Law


On July 20, 2010, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed into law S796, An Act Relative to Safety Regulations for School Athletic Programs, which directs the Department of Public Health's Division of Violence and Injury Prevention to develop an interscholastic athletic Head Injury Safety Training program with the aim of reducing the potentially catastrophic impact of sports-related concussions.

  • The Head Injury Safety Training Program requires all coaches, athletes, and other participants, including the parents or legal guardians of players, to complete a course that highlights the signs and symptoms of concussion and provides treatment recommendations.
  • The law states that students participating in an athletic activity who become unconscious during a practice or competition shall not return to play until been cleared by a healthcare professional.
  • The law also requires that high school athletes who incur head injuries, or are suspected to have sustained a concussion, even when there is no loss of consciousness, sit out until they receive medical clearance to return (i.e. "return to play").


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- Sandra L. Fenwick, President and CEO