Functional brain study of chronic traumatic head injury

RESUMO

Explosive aggressive behaviour is a significant clinical and medico-legal problem in patients suffering from head injury. However, experts in neuropsychiatry have proposed a specific category for this disorder: the "organic aggressive syndrome:". The basic reason for proposing this diagnosis is that it describes the specificity of the violent conduct secondary to "brain damage" with greater precision. Early diagnosis and treatment of the injury is critical. The impact of hnetium-99m-hexamethylpropuleneamine oxime (HMPAO) was examined for measuring brain damage in correlation to neuropsychological performance in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). We thus report the case of a twelve-year-old child with a history of CET, who presents with serious episodes of heteroaggressiveness and suggest the usefulness of single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) to establish the validity of this psychiatric diagnosis. The appearance of modern functional neuro-image techniques (SPECT) may help to increase the validity of clinical diagnoses in the field of psychiatry in general and of forensic psychiatry in particularly, as the related findings may be used as demarcation criteria to establish syndromic diagnoses