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If you’ve ever gotten a concussion before—maybe during sports or even a car crash—you know it can be an incredibly disorienting experience. You might be dazed, feel nauseous, and even lose your memory temporarily. Luckily, there’s a good chance you’ll recover in just a few days or weeks. However, a significant amount of people don’t—suffering from long-lasting and unseen symptoms for the rest of their lives.
One of these issues is depression. Studies have shown that incidence of the symptom emerges in half of patients within a year of a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Nearly 66 percent show signs of depression within seven years following the injury.
This can be for a variety of reasons, such as an emotional response to the trauma of a brain injury, or a patient’s genetic predisposition to depression. However, a new study suggests that the issue could be much deeper than that.