WASHINGTON - Stephen Kinney regained consciousness to the sound of voices screaming “IED, IED!’’ over the radio and the smell of acrid smoke filling his Humvee. As he fumbled to help his comrades, he took stock of his own injuries.
His shoulder was torn, his right ear deafened, and his thigh bruised from his hip to his knee. But the Army National Guard sergeant escaped critical injuries from the roadside bomb in Iraq that rocked his vehicle in November 2004.
The hidden problems began when he returned home.
The now-retired postal carrier from North Chelmsford had problems remembering names on his route. Crossword puzzle answers eluded him. A doctor revealed the reason: Though he had been wearing his helmet when the improvised explosive device went off, he had sustained a traumatic brain injury.
“I don’t think they knew at the time that we’d be up against this weapon, an IED,’’ Kinney, 58, said of the military’s preparation for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Pentagon officials now know what their service members are up against - and that a primary protection for the men and women on the front lines, the helmet, is inadequate. The result is a race to solve one of their biggest equipment challenges: developing a helmet that not only protects brains from the traditional enemies of bullets and shrapnel but also from blunt blows and invisible, devastating blast waves from explosions.
The toll is stark: Since the beginning of 2006, when Iraqi militants made IEDs their weapon of choice, nearly 140,000 service members have suffered brain injuries, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. Almost 10,000 such injuries have occurred in just the first three months of 2011.
Only a small percentage of those injuries - a few hundred a year - are strictly penetrating wounds from bullets or projectiles that helmets were designed to protected against, according to the center’s data. The rest are mild to severe injuries that result from blows, falls, or blast waves of energy - often in combination - from explosions.
The military is attacking the problem on multiple fronts. Government-funded researchers nationwide - including at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, and the New England Veterans Administration medical centers - are examining the brain, neuron by neuron. Their cutting-edge research focuses on how the brain reacts to blunt force, such as Kinney’s head slamming against the ceiling of his Humvee during the blast, or to shock waves from a blast that can damage its delicate tissue, sometimes in ways that don’t emerge until long after the injury.
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