Brain Injury due to Mechanical Trauma and Ischemic-Hypoxic Insult: Biomarkers of Brain Injury and Oxidative Stress

Brain injury (BI) due to mechanical trauma represents one of the major causes of mortality and disability in the world. The pathophysiology of BI is composed of two different pathogenetic moments: primary damage due directly to trauma, with mechanical forces applied to the head, and subsequent biochemical events due to a complex cell response that leads to the death of neuronal cells and classified as secondary damage. Accumulating evidence suggests that the extent of brain injury and the clinical outcome after BI are modulated, to some degree, by genetic variants. In the literature, the existence of a rather precise chronology of expression of the different markers of hypoxic-ischemic brain damage has been shown, which is correlated to the duration of the same insult and is to be ascribed, essentially, to a different stimulation of the different cellular types and also to a different response by the same cells to the ischemic insult