Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the leading causes of death and long-term disability among persons in the United States with toddler age children being one of the largest populations affected. Each year, on average, TBIs are associated with an estimated 1.1 million emergency department visits, 235,000 hospitalizations, and 50,000 deaths in the United States. One of the difficulties in developing effective treatments for TBI has been the poor translatability of therapies from the widely-used rodent models to human patients. In this study, UGA animal and dairy scientists developed a novel piglet focal traumatic brain injury model comparable to toddler age children. The developed piglet model displays brain lesioning, loss of neurons and motor function deficits similar to human patients. These data suggest that the piglet model is comparable to human patients and will likely be more predictive of human out comes for drug, device and other therapeutic treatments.