Rocking out to heavy metal can be hazardous
to one’s health, as one fan of the well-known rock group Motörhead can attest
after treatment for brain bleeding.
by John
Tyburski
Copyright © Daily
Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
Quiet Riot
advised the world in 1983 to “Bang your head—mental health will drive you mad.”
They might have added that the headbanging may cause one’s brain to bleed.
Doctors in
Germany reported treating a Motörhead fan for brain injury resulting from his
headbanging habit but stressed that the case is unusual and that the risk of
brain injury from this type of activity is low.
At the
beginning of the year, a 50-year-old man was treated at Hannover Medical School
after he complained of constant and worsening headaches. He had no history of
head injuries or drug use. After further questioning, he revealed that he had
been a long-time headbanger and had most recently did a lot of headbanging at a
Motörhead concert he attended with his son.
Doctors
ordered a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan and upon examination of the
results found that the man’s brain was bleeding. He needed to have a hole
drilled through his skull through which the blood could be drained. The
patient’s headaches subsided, and doctors found a benign cyst in followup scans
that might have predisposed the man to his injury.
“We are not
against headbanging,” said Dr. Ariyan Pirayesh Islamian, one of the doctors who
treated the man. “The risk of injury is very, very low. But I think if [our
patient] had [gone] to a classical concert, this would not have happened.”
Bleeding in
the head causes displacement of brain tissue and an increase of intracranial
pressure that can slowly choke off the vital blood supply to the brain. Left
untreated, brain bleeds can be debilitating and even fatal. Brain bleeds occur
when the brain bumps against the inside wall of the skull violently enough to
rupture a blood vessel.
The case of
the headbanging brain-bleeder is described this
week in the journal The Lancet.
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