Minor Head Trauma and Consciousness

Posted by:

Alfredo Pereira Jr (group admin)

Date:

08 December 2007

Comments:

1 comment

Dear All:

Dale Antanitus is (or was) a pediatric physician in Harvard, who advanced some interesting hypotheses about the role of astrocytes.
These ideas are found in his site
One of them is that minor head trauma causes loss of consciousness by means of a perturbation of calcium waves in astrocytes:
“Equally mysterious are the mechanisms producing unconsciousness resulting from minor head trauma insufficient in force to cause any detectable injury. Mechanical perturbation has been shown to precipitate calcium waves in vitro. A blow to the head results in a mechanical compression wave traveling through the brain. This mechanical force could be sufficient to produce a pattern of widespread sequential calcium waves that reflect the shape and velocity of the mechanical compression wave. The astrocytic calcium waves so produced would be unrelated to, and for a while unresponsive to the influence of, normal sensory input. Meaningful interactions between astrocytes and synapses could be overwhelmed by the disruptively nonsensical mechanically induced calcium wave patterns. Despite the inability of the mechanical force to produce macro or microscopic injury, the brain—the person—would be “knocked out” or temporarily unconscious”

Below I link other papers about head concussion, and the proposed roles of astrocytes for memory and consciousness:
1) Giza CC, Hovda DA. The Neurometabolic Cascade of Concussion. J Athl Train. 2001 Sep;36(3):228-235. Freely available here
2) Caudle RM. Memory in astrocytes: a hypothesis.
Theor Biol Med Model. 2006 Jan 18;3:2. Freely available here
3) Robertson JM. The Astrocentric Hypothesis: proposed role of astrocytes in consciousness and
memory formation. J Physiol Paris. 2002 Apr-Jun;96(3-4):251-5. Non-free access here

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