Hello everyone,

I'm a 21-year-old fellow who's been reading this forum on and off for the past five years or so. I've only ever made a handful of fragmentary posts, so I thought a longer one might be in order. I also want to bring up a theory that I've seen briefly mentioned but never really taken seriously in the forum (perhaps with good reason).

I don't want to go into exhaustive detail about my medical history. Suffice it to say that, unlike most people on the forum it seems, I never suffered a serious concussion. I had a minor concussion at age 10 caused by pitched baseball. I never lost consciousness but was quite sick and disoriented in the hours after the pitch. CT scan in the emergency room was clean. I don't recall any lingering symptoms beyond a day or two after the injury.

At age 12 I accidentally banged heads with another student in gym class. We ran into each other at full tilt. Again, as far as I remember, I felt perfectly normal after the injury.

In the weeks after the second injury, however, I started developing various symptoms of PCS, not all of which I'll list here. I never fully rested myself physically or mentally for quite a while after that injury. In the following years I banged my head many more times in the usual ways (car doors, bunk beds, etc.) but never in ways that I would expect to cause problems for a healthy person.


I am now much better than I once was. My only real remaining complaint is the one that crops up again and again on this forum: sensitivity to bumps. The story is old hat here by now, but I'll just go over it one more time: jostles, jolts, minor bumps, car rides, and such like give me a headache and foggy thinking for days afterwards. Usually four days at most, but sometimes a few weeks. As I've mentioned in a previous post, by far the worst jolts are those that come from my own feet. If I miss my footing and come down hard on my heel, I will usually be out of commission for days, sometimes a week or two. I am entirely convinced that there are both psychological and non-psychological components to these relapses.

I have managed to considerably lessen this problem with memory-foam shoe inserts. But it is still a problem.

Now for the theory. I've seen the idea mentioned on this forum a couple times before, though never with much serious discussion, that many lingering PCS symptoms might be due to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leaks. In particular, there are some old posts suggesting that head sensitivity might arise from inflammation caused by a CSF leak, or from a lack of CSF to cushion the brain from impacts. It seems like a long shot, but it also seems possible. (There is much interesting literature on CSF leaks to be found on the internet. I saw one study, for instance, that looked at sufferers of whiplash injuries with ongoing headaches and neck pain; more than half of them turned out to have leaks.)

I have gone perhaps further than most in following up this possibility: I have had two blind epidural blood patches and an MRI of my entire spine. The MRI was dubbed "clean," although it did show brain descent of one or two centimeters, which I understand is vaguely indicative of leak, though nowhere close to conclusive. The patches did not really help me, although they certainly made me feel different for a while afterwards. I will gladly go into more detail about them in a subsequent post.

What I want to ask now is whether anyone else has given much thought to this theory, has seen any illuminating studies, had any personal experiences with leaks, or just generally has any thoughts about the theory.

Best wishes,
Carrico