Matt, a 17-year old high school senior, sat nervously between his parents as his father, Paul, asked me what I thought was the cause of his son's apparent behavior problems. His mother, Joanne, nodded her head in agreement, sharing the same level of frustration as did her husband.
The United States is seeing more and more young men returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with horrendous results in terms of family integration, societal integration, and domestic violence. Some of these individuals, according to Cernak, are found on the battlefield dead with no marks whatsoever on them.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) causes several types of damage to the brain that affect the cerebral cortex, subcortical nuclear structures, and their widespread white matter connections (see chapters by Kochanek et al. and Hovda for more details). The resulting cascade of pathological changes disrupts neural functioning at multiple levels, from individual cellular and vascular structures to the larger brain networks they comprise
