ORLANDO, Fla. – When someone suffers a traumatic brain injury from a sports accident, car crash, or military operation, the protocol is they’re rushed to an emergency room where the patient typically receives a CT scan to tell how bad the injury is and what to do next.
But a CT scan delivers a decent dose of radiation and the results take time, often hours.
No longer at Orlando Health hospitals.
The ER at Orlando Regional Medical Center is the first and only place in the world so far where a doctor can do a blood test to get an idea of how bad the brain injury is and get results in 15 minutes.
Dr. Linda Papa is an Orlando Health emergency medicine physician and Director of Clinical Research at Orlando Health.
“You don’t even have to leave the patient’s bedside, you can just stay there by the patient, complete the blood test, and make critical decisions right then and there,” said Dr. Papa. “This is amazing. This is going to revolutionize the way we treat traumatic brain injuries.”
Dr. Papa has been interested in traumatic brain injury biomarker research for 25 years. She discovered the the biomarker that made the invention possible.
“And it was on a shoestring budget, nobody was doing this kind of work before,” Dr. Papa said. “And from a clinical perspective, I was seeing my patients struggle with mild traumatic brain injury. And it just felt like a black box because we weren’t doing what we needed to do. So we started looking at different biomarkers with a rat model and then we went to humans with severe traumatic brain injury and then moderate to more mild injuries. I remember looking at my data one night, this was like 20 years ago, and I was just flabbergasted, I was floored! Because the data showed the correlation between these biomarkers and the severity of the traumatic brain injury. So it’s kind of a ‘Eureka’ moment, I was like, ‘oh my gosh, we just discovered a blood test for brain injury!’”
Dr. Papa said the medical community told her she was wasting her time.
“And we figured well we’re going to give it a try anyways,” Dr. Papa said. “If you think about it we’ve got blood tests for everything in the body almost, right? The heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the liver but one of the most important organs, the brain, had no blood test. And so we knew we needed to take this into that sphere. We needed to open up this black box and figure out what’s going on.”
Dr. Papa said she identified biomarkers in the bloodstream — essentially different traits — that change depending on how severe a brain injury is.
“I mean the utility of a test like this is immense. You can use it in the ambulance to screen patients to triage them to trauma centers,” Dr. Papa said. “You could use it on the sidelines of organized sports to evaluate injured players. You could use it in the military.
The blood test is currently in use in ORMC’s ER but Abbott Laboratories, the maker of the blood test, is looking to expand it nationwide.
“The test is approved for adults right now but we’re working on it for children because it will be so valuable in a pediatric population especially children who are nonverbal or can’t express themselves,” Dr. Papa said. “It’ll give us an idea of what’s going on after an injury. So it will help us so much when it gets to that stage and I hope in the next couple of years and will be available for children.”
Dr. Papa said the test has been approved not to definitively diagnose a brain injury but rather to detect the presence of a possible brain injury and offer direction to doctors.
“It will tell us how severe the injury is,” Dr. Papa said. “And so if it’s at a very critical level we know that they will need important life-saving treatment and in some cases they’ll need to go to the Operating Room and have surgery done, some will have to be admitted for observation, some won’t be able to go home, they’ll have to go in the hospital. And on the flip side if we find the levels are below that red flag level, then we can actually avoid doing CT scans at all.”
Orlando Health officials said that ORMC is the first hospital in the world to roll out the new TBI blood test.
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