Preventable Brain Damage: Brain Vulnerability and Brain Health.

The prevention of human brain damage assumes striking importance in light of recent evidence that: 1) many minor blows to the head once regarded as inconsequential now must be viewed as producing consequential long-term and even permanent effects; 2) many minor blows, such as one observes in boxing, produce cumulative effects; 3) brain injury makes people highly vulnerable to catastrophic effects produced by a subsequent blow to the head; 4) there is a progression of brain damage that continues long after the trauma, for example, atrophy following a brain injury; there is increasing evidence that a variety of drugs taken during pregnancy produce brain pathology in the fetus and neuropsychological deficits that manifest themselves later in the child's life; 6) brain damage has an epidemiology; and brain disorders causes "functional" psychiatric disorder.

This book discusses the causes of brain damage and prevention of brain damage, covering such detailed information as Impact Damage--motor vehicle accidents, contact sports, noncontact sports, accidental injuries of children, brain impairment and family violence, assault, psychosurgery, and ECT and permanent brain damage; and Chemical Damage--industroal toxins, agricultural and domestic neurotoxic substances, neuropsychology of alcohol-induced brain damage, neurological and neuropsychological consequences of drug abuse, and neuropsychological consequences of drug malnutrition.