Study Suggests Almost Half Of The Homeless Have Prior Brain Injuries

From MedlinePlus, "Traumatic Brain Injury Common Among Homeless Men: In small Canadian study, 70 percent of such injuries occurred during childhood or teen years" by Robert Preidt:

Brain injuries are common among homeless men and most of those injuries occur before they lose their homes, a small study found.

Canadian researchers looked at 111 homeless men, aged 27 to 81, in Toronto and found that 45 percent of them had suffered a traumatic brain injury at some point in their lives.

Seventy percent of those brain injuries occurred when the men were children or teens, and 87 percent occurred before the men became homeless, the investigators found.

Overall, assaults caused 60 percent of the brain injuries among the men in the study, followed by sports and recreation (44 percent), and traffic crashes and falls (42 percent), according to the study published April 25 in the journal CMAJ Open.

While assaults were the most common cause of brain injury among men older than 40, falls from drug/alcohol blackouts were the most common cause of brain injury in those under 40, the findings showed.