ORLANDO, Florida. – When someone suffers a traumatic brain injury in a sports accident, car accident, or military surgery, protocol calls for them to be taken to the emergency room, where the patient typically receives a computed tomography (CT) scan to determine how severe the injury is and what to do next.

However, a computed tomography (CT) scan delivers a significant dose of radiation, and results often take hours or longer to become available.

No longer in Orlando Health hospitals.

The emergency room at Orlando Regional Medical Center is the first and only place in the world where a doctor can perform a blood test to get an idea of ​​the severity of a brain injury and get the result within 15 minutes.

Dr. Linda Papa is an emergency medicine physician at Orlando Health and director of clinical research at Orlando Health.

“You don’t even have to leave the patient’s bed, you can just stay next to them, do the blood work and make important decisions right there,” said Dr. Papa. “This is incredible. This will revolutionize the way we treat traumatic brain injury.”

She has been interested in researching biomarkers in traumatic brain injuries for 25 years and invented the blood test.

“And we were doing this on a very tight budget, nobody had done this kind of work before,” Dr. Papa said. “And from a clinical perspective, I saw my patients struggling 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 using a rat model and then moved on to people with severe traumatic brain injury and then moderate to milder injuries. I remember looking at my data one night, this was about 20 years ago, and I was just speechless, I was speechless! Because the data showed the correlation between these biomarkers and the severity of traumatic brain injury. So it was kind of a ‘eureka’ moment, I just thought ‘Oh my God, we just discovered a blood test for brain injury!'”

Dr. Papa said the medical community told her she was wasting her time.

“And we thought we’d give it a try anyway,” Dr. Papa said. “When you think about it, we have blood tests for almost everything in the body, right? For the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the liver, but there was no blood test for one of the most important organs, the brain. And so we knew we had to get this into that area. We had to open up that black box and find out what was going on.”

Dr. Papa said she has identified biomarkers in the bloodstream – essentially different characteristics – that change depending on the severity of a brain injury.

“I mean, the utility of a test like this is enormous. You could use it in the ambulance to examine patients and then take them to trauma centers,” Dr. Papa said. “You could use it on the fringes of organized sports to examine injured players. You could use it in the military.”

The blood test is currently used in ORMC’s emergency department, but Abbot Laboratories, the manufacturer of the blood test, wants to roll it out nationwide.

“The test is currently approved for adults, but we are working on testing it for children as well, because it will be very valuable for the pediatric population, especially for children who cannot speak or express themselves,” said Dr. Papa. “It will give us an idea of ​​what happens after an injury, so it will help us a lot when the time comes, and I hope that in the next few years it will be available for children as well.”

Dr. Papa said the test was not approved to definitively diagnose a brain injury, but rather to determine the presence of a possible brain injury and to provide guidance to doctors.

“This tells us how severe the injury is,” said Dr. Papa. “If the reading is very critical, we know that patients need life-saving treatment. In some cases, they have to go to the operating room for surgery. Some have to be admitted for observation, others cannot go home and have to go to the hospital. And on the other hand, if we find that the readings are below this warning level, we can actually avoid CT scans altogether.”

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