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Military Helmet Design Contributes To Brain Damage
BuzzSkyline writes "Improvements in helmets have helped modern soldiers survive bullets and blasts that would have killed them in past wars. But increasing numbers of soldiers are suffering long lasting brain damage from explosions, partly as a result of what appears to be a flaw in helmet designs. Although the blast itself may not accelerate the brain inside a soldier's head enough to cause injury, shockwaves that make it through the space between a helmet and a soldier's head can cause the skull to flex, leading to ripples in the skull that can create damaging pressures in the brain. Simulations that relied on 'code originally designed to simulate how a detonated weapon rattles a building or tank' could lead to new helmets that reduce the traumatic brain injuries that many soldiers suffer as a result of improvised explosive devices and other moderate-sized blasts. The research is due to be published in Physical Review Letters, but a pre-print of the entire article is currently available on the Physics ArXiv."
Green military uniforms have also been observed to be a cause of brain damage, proportional to the number of stars on the uniform.
Ezekiel 23:20
War really does lead to some of our race's biggest advances.
Although they did fail to consider the motivating potential of porn as well. Stupid Shadows...
Is it possible to design the helmets in such a way that prevents this? If not, it might be a necessary evil. I would rather run the risk of TBI than have my head shot off or something, honestly. It might just be a sad side effect of our need to have soldiers.
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
Helmets which "have helped modern soldiers survive bullets and blasts that would have killed them in past wars" are being accused of causing brain damage.
I guess boxing gloves cause brain damage, too? Or maybe it's boxing that causes brain damage, and the gloves reduce the risk...
Now, if they can make better helmets that reduce the risk of brain damage even further, props to them. That doesn't mean the current generation of helmets are "causing" brain damage.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Certainly it's possible, they just need better shock absorption. The current design transmits too much of the shock to the skull.
Caveat Utilitor
This is considered a flaw in design? I was unaware that these helmets were designed to protect against shockwaves as oppoesed to simply projectiles. "Military Helmet Design Contributes To Brain Damage" makes it sound like the helmet itself is inflicting brain damage, no?
I'm not following the title. An explosion near the head causes brain damage. Wearing a helmet mitigates the effects of the explosion. A military helmet is not maximally effective in mitigating the effects. How did we arrive at a military helmet causes brain damage?
You have been warned.
Really. Please stop. There was a common word for it. It's called a bomb. If there is some sort of hidden triggering mechanism present, then it is a booby-trap. If the payload is large enough, then it is a landmine. I do believe that the US military started to call it IED for Orwellian-like doublespeak reasons.
I tought helmets were designed to protect from debri and flying objects caused by explosions, not the shockwave from 2 pounds of C-4 lying around.
What a headline. Actually, overall, I would think that helmets reduce injury and death. Both in combat and civilian arenas. Just because an inefficiency in military helmet design exists is no reason to say that "Helmet Design Contributes to Brain Damage". As compared to what? Taking shrapnel or a bullet without a helmet? Now the article does suggest that the helmet may increase skull deformation from pressure waves secondary to the helmet design. But the authors admit that these are preliminary results and may or may not relate to the final outcome; TBI. Still, if this line of research pans out, it could lead to some real improvement in head protection. Civilian and military. I just hate misleading, sensational headlines...
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It causes less damage if you use them, even if some scientist found a small flaw in their design. I think a bullet to the head would cause more problems then you brain taking a hit because your helmet stopped the bullet.
I would also be more worried about the person shooting at you.
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
I wonder if the helmet is designed with numerous ventilation holes it can diffuse the shock wave?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
There was just an article earlier today (Orange Goo) about a material that helps absorb shock, so why not line the inside of the helmets with the stuff?
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Certainly it's possible, they just need better shock absorption. The current design transmits too much of the shock to the skull.
This problem is actually caused by the helmet's method of not transmitting shock to the skull. FTA:
So the trick is keeping the overpressure out of the helmet, while keeping it separated from the skull. Perhaps a dual helmet design; Rigid outer shell to absorb and deflect impact, and a second separate inner covering to resist overpressure. Either that, or in place of ACH pads, some type of system relying on fluid dynamics to redirects force forward, out the face of the helmet, rather than inward toward the skull.
RTFA.
Free Martian Whores!
Did I hear somebody calling my name?
No brain, no pain.
"I survived an Improvised Explosive Device and all I got was this lousy drain bamage"
There is no flaw in the helmet. What the article describes is simple - injuries that would normally kill people are now survivable due to superior helmets. But that leaves them alive with brain damage instead of dead.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
All of which is fancy way of saying "the current design transmits too much shock to the skull" Duh!
From TFA: "Because the effects TBI are so long-lasting and complex, the cost to the government is enormous."
I know it costs a lot to train, feed, and deploy a soldier. And when said solider is hit with a TBI it actaully costs more than if they had actually been killed outright. But even with that I think the 'cost to government' is not even on the radar when compared with the trillion+ bailout. Not to sound cold (and I have family deployed right now), but these soldiers are just meat to the government. Now if they were 'too big to fail' then maybe we could take case of these folks....
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I remember reading a similar article about motorcycle helmets, which said that the incident of brain trauma was higher in helmeted riders versus helmetless. Same reason - the rigid helmet transmitted shockwave straight through the skull to the brain, where the facial structure absorbed a lot of the shock in unhelmeted riders.
So the choice seemed to be pretty and brain damaged, or ugly and smart.
I think they've redesigned the helmets since then.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Military helmets indeed cause brain damage: If the solider was not wearing a helmet they would be dead -- and thus, they would have no brain damage.
shockwaves that make it through the space between a helmet and a soldier's head
Either Jarhead isn't wearing his helmet properly or there IS a major flaw in the design. This kind of thing is mentioned everywhere.
Have you ever worn a bike helmet that was 3 sizes too large? How effective was it? Heres an experiment, place a ball on the ground and smack it with your hand. Notice how much it bounces, moves, etc etc. Now take that ball and hold it 2 feet off the ground. Now hit it, and see how much more it bounces.
If the helmet has an inch of gap, its no surprise that helmets are hitting troops with more effective damage then if they were wearing nothing at all.
But I'm in the military, and I'd rather brain damage than brain splattage.
QamuIs Heg qaq law' lorvIs yInqaq puS
Was a simple metal hat with a (fiberglass?) liner. The current helmet provides far more protection than the previous model. Keep that in mind in the context of this criticism.
Also, as a minor quibble point, the airborne modification of the helmet has additional padding on the interior which may affect the dynamic of the air gap between outer shell and liner. My assumption is that the study was performed on the standard helmet configuration, but it's worth observing that there are non-standard configurations in wide spread use.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
It's kind of interesting to see a story like this. Helmets were once made out of copper or leather or other soft materials leading to extremely strong steel helmets and now composite (almost brittle) helmets that absorb impact. Why? Because in the previous designs, they were found faulty, and someone ingeniously improved upon the old design.
Can we expect helmets to protect against everything? Let's say that helmets did protect well against the shockwaves of blasts, then the article author would be complaining that helmets do not protect soldiers from a chance encounter with another planet or some other random scenario.
Obviously there are still improvements to be made, but to make a silly comment that helmets cause brain damage is misleading. As the threat changes and issues are discovered, new equipment will be designed to combat those new conditions. After all is said and done, the helmets used today are far better than they were even a single generation ago.
I supposed that depends on how you define "flaw"...
True, which it makes it more surprising that you get it wrong.
That is not, in fact, what TFA describes.TFA describes mechanisms by traumatic brain injury occurs in blast situations, and the specific ways that both the former-standard PASGT helmet design and the newer ACH design increase the effects of these mechanisms.
That explains some of the behavior of my Drill Sergeants.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
When I wore the Army helmets in basic training, I noticed this design flaw. Basically, there's no padding or shock absorbing foam in the helmet. (there's a redesigned helmet that is in use now that has a little bit of padding but not like a bike helmet). Sometimes, soldiers would playfully rifle butt each other in the head. I noticed whenever this happened to me that the rigid helmet would let most of the force of the blow right through, and it would make a loud ringing sound. Evidently, that's pretty bad when an IED goes off.
Of course, the ultimate solution is to put infantry drones in the blast zone of IED, not human beings. Unfortunately for all the soldiers who have died, the tech won't be ready for another 20-30 years.
They also make it possible to hit the head. Without gloves you'd break your hands if you stood there punching at somebody's head. In the old days of bare-knuckle boxing most of the blows were to the body. There were a lot of bruised ribs but hardly anybody died.
No sig today...
I think a lot of this stems from the way the current helmet is fitted to the soldiers head. (Yes, I am a soldier, 18th Airborne Corp, Ft Bragg, NC)
1 - The older Kevlar helmet was fitted to your head with a "sweat band" strapped to the inside of the helmet, which could be adjusted to fit your head exactly.
2 - The newer ACH (Advanced Combat Helmet) is fitted with velcro backed pads which attach inside the helmet.
Let me say now that it is *very* common for CIF (where you get issued your equipment) to be out of your size and give you the next size up. With the older Kevlar (case 1 above) you could still fit the sweat band to fit your head, securing the helmet. With the ACH (case 2 above) if the helmet is too big, the pads will be loose on your head, and the helmet will rattle around on your head when concussions occur nearby.
You're not going to claim that if astronomers really wanted to be scientific, they would start their research by gathering up a bunch of hydrogen and piling it together in empty space and then watching what happens, are you?
I want to watch that study, That would be soooo cool!
Didn't help if rain rattling on it gave away your position, most in deep cover/G-suit type situation used Boony hats `cause their quieter when moving through dense cover.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
... There really isn't an inbetween there.
There is an in between, it is the difference between Special Olympics and Terri Schiavo
RTFA.
Sure, it can. TFA discusses, in detail, the mechanisms by which this occurs.
This is where reading TFA comes in: in fact, TFA identifies mechanisms by which both the previous-standard design (the PASGT helmet) and the newer standard US military helmet design increase the loads on the skull that lead to brain injury (the former focussing shockwaves that underwash the helmet, the latter by tightly coupling movement and deformation of the helmet to the skull.)
So, it is not the case that wearing a helmet mitigates the brain-injury effects of a blast and military helmets just fall short of being "maximally effective"; rather, it is the case that the current and previous standard military helmets magnify the injury-causing effects of blasts.
We don't really know for sure if it can be done without too much compromise somewhere else. TFA identifies the problems with two recent standard designs (the current standard and the preceding one) and the mechanisms by which they contribute to injury, which is a first step to trying to figure out whether we can do better and how.
maybe the soldiers should smear their heads with orange goo before putting their helmets on.
as I'm not in the military, but if I were, I'd rather /no/ brain damage, /or/ brain splattage.
In the first world war German soldiers found that the spikes on their pointy helmets tended to get caught on things like tree branches, bunker roofs and occasionally each other.
The Bavarians came up with an ingenious solution - put the spike on the inside. As an added bonus it stopped them falling off.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This might explain what happened to a friend of mine who died last month. He did say he got blown up 4 times over there and never had a scratch. He also spent 2 years at Brooks Army Hospital with brain damage.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Thus it may be possible to solve the problem, but not without tradeoffs...
So then the soldier is stuck with a helmet that is even more bulky and weighs ten pounds and has a tendency to trap a lot of body heat unless an active liquid cooling system is deployed. And after it's deployed, you then see a lot of soldiers not wearing them because they prefer to have more mobility and endurance on the battlefield.
In other words, sometimes one compromise is still better than another.
Without seat belts you go through the windscreen and probably die
With seat belts, your chest is compressed and you puncture a lung or your heart
A dead body is no burden on health care. A wounded soldier is a burden on his unit.
Sometimes it's better not to survive
Watch those corners
Anyone familiar with footage taken by soldiers on the ground will be able to cite incidents where 500 lb bombs are used on enemies as close as 70 m. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e14_1251741282 Seeing the shock wave and then having repeated blasts enter the helmet would most likely compound the problem even further. Danger close bomb strikes are most likely contributing to the TBI. Damn. Revert to hellfires? Precision must increase if the blast diameter decreases. Sometimes, a Hellfire will not even destroy everything in the blast radius. I am not familiar with other kinds of warheads, but what I see on footage from liveleak.com is a focused blast. A 500 lb bomb is intensely destructive.
... it's a good thing the injury was on a part they don't use.
You're not going to claim that if astronomers really wanted to be scientific, they would start their research by gathering up a bunch of hydrogen and piling it together in empty space and then watching what happens, are you?
Actually yes. While they do not actually do that (it would take too long and besides, the universe is already doing it for them) they use scientific results from laboratory experiments (e.g. plasma physics, particle physics, atomic physics etc.) to predict what they will observe and then go out and look for it or, if they see something unexpected e.g. helium, they turn to laboratory measurements and calculations to determine what causes it. This is what makes astronomy a science and is why it is so interesting to other scientists.
Without laboratory based experiments, either based on their observations or preceding them, all astronomers would be do is staring up at the universe and making pretty pictures. The best current example of astronomical observations leading experimental searches is Dark Matter. Astronomers have done an amazing job extracting information about the properties of Dark Matter just from observations but until we can actually make some in a lab we will not know what it is made of.
"The helmet acts as a windscoop, so the pressure between the skull and helmet is larger than the blast wave by itself"
My read was exactly the same. The helmets are now so much better at protecting heads than anything ever has been in the past, that we're having to model air pressure caused skull flex in order to find something to make better. That's fantastic! Not too long ago the trauma was more likely to be a piece of a bomb going through the brain that caused the damage.
And yeah -- anything they can do to make them better is a good thing, but lets applaud how far they've come.
The only thing I'd add, is that if we could find a way to have less soldiers in the way of bombs and bullets, we could be less aggressive on helmet designs too. Ah well.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"Although the blast itself may not accelerate the brain inside a soldier's head enough to cause injury, shockwaves that make it through the space between a helmet and a soldier's head can cause the skull to flex"
This almost sounds like saying a bullet itself doesn't kill, but the hole it leaves in your chest could be fatal.
that explains abu graib! our soldiers were too brain damaged to know any better!
man, i should run for president.
Good people go to bed earlier.
...bankrupt entire nations...
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At first I thought someone should make fun of people in the military as already being brain-damaged, or else they would not join in the first place.
Then I realized that that wasn't true; there are many intelligent people who simply needed money for college who joined the military.
Then I realized this was the military's response to NCLB: use these helmets to give brain damage to soldiers, bringing their intelligence down to the same level as the average jarhead, thus saving them having to pay for college, as no college will now accept them! A brilliant scheme that enforces mediocrity and prevents them from having to pay for college for ex-soldiers!
After serving 6 years in the Navy and thus having grown adapt to the bureaucratic sludge of it all, I would in fact propose that military service in general causes brain damage. On a daily basis, I surprise many civilians with my ability to tolerate things otherwise thought nonsensical.
... I knocked myself out for two weeks, and slowly faded back over a period of about 6 months.
About a year after my TBI, I developed a repetitive strain injury. This was not due to "repetitive motion", but the "trauma" (injuries) I'd accumulated over my entire life.
Years later I found a doctor who specialized in releasing trauma from the body. After a half-dozen visits, he said that my head was starting to work properly again. When he first started working with me, "[my] head was like a disorganized bag of sand." He said the body has a carrying capacity for trauma, and once that capacity is reached the owner quickly becomes much more dysfunctional than he had been before.
Pay no attention to the commercial link above - I recently launched the site, and need to increase my google-foo. I really ought to write something for soldiers with traumatic brain injuries, because there are some very good treatment options to quickly "undo" the damage. If you don't want to buy my book, but need help dealing with stored trauma, look into Andrew Taylor Still's body of work.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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Coming from a military family I can tell you that the helmets of today are leaps ahead of what we used to have, but at the same time are seriously lacking in many areas. I have seen the helmets change to the most recent Kevlar versions while I active. They weigh a lot (they have been improving this) and arent nearly as useful as they are purported to be. To myself and lots of other guys, we generally saw helmets at one of those things that is traditional and required PPE but it doesnt really do anything. The current helmets are expecially NOT effective against bullets (whoever said they were designed for bullets is full of shit, go shoot one with a 9mm and watch it go right through) They are mostly designed/usefull for two things, 1) To protect your head in a concussive blast, such as an IED. and 2)protect from shrapnel. As far as protecting your head from blasts, the pads inside the helmet also make all the difference into the world as to how much they actually protect the head. The stock pads suck donkey balls because the DOD is too damn cheap, but, right as I was getting out they starting actually giving the greenies good pads, I bought my own from blackhawk... As far as the shrapnel protection goes, I saw an IED go off right next to one of our guys, and the shrapnel literally sliced through the kevlar like butter (anything over 4cm long will probably penetrate given a certain distance)he was dead within 15 minutes. So in short, the current helmets are pretty usefull if all your doing is riding around in convoys likely to get hit, but for most other things they are literally useless weight that makes the political drivel higher up (people with shiny stuff on their collar) think everything is alright. When I was working with the scout snipers they would often drop ALL of the PPE because it just slowed them down and made their movement loud and wore them out.
They simply need to affix a bright yellow warning label on the front which will outline the dangers of wearing the helmets.
perhaps incorporate a material that changes from solid to liquid under high shock but is still able to revert back to a solid for shock absorbing under normal circumstances?
We called another damaged brain ;)
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