This just in from Las Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — “For all of the right reasons, there has been an increase in awareness about traumatic brain injury in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan,” says David Hovda. As professor and vice chief of research affairs for UCLA’s Division of Neurosurgery and director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center, Hovda has several years experience in treating patients who have suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI) in sports injuries, car accidents and many other life-threatening situations. And Hovda and his neurosurgery team have made a number of breakthroughs in the field of brain injury.

Working in cooperation with Walter Reed Naval Medical Center over the last several years, Hovda says treating the soldiers who return from the Iraq war has yielded some interesting revelations. These have reframed TBI beyond sports medicine and tragic community folklore into a new way to treat head injuries from combat.

“Although severe TBI does occur in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters, the most recent concern has been focused on the mild-to-moderate level of injury to the brain,” he says. “Commonly referred to as concussions, these mild brain injuries often are due to individuals being in close proximity to blasts set off by improvised explosive devices. What is troubling is there is little being done to diagnose if an individual has sustained a mild or moderate TBI.”