Can Brain Injury Lead to Death Years Later?

June 26, 2009— -- Eight years after he was struck in the back of the head with a baseball bat, a 26-year-old Colorado man was found lifeless in his bed last week with no obvious cause of death and no sign of foul play, Sgt. Bruce Whittich of the Longmont Police Department said.

Timothy Whalen was 18 years old when Matthew Bauer, also 18 at the time, attacked him from behind in a disagreement about a keg of beer allegedly stolen from a party near the University of Colorado at Boulder campus, according to reporting by the Associated Press.

Now local officials are trying to determine whether the events of that summer night led to his death years later. Tom Faure of the Boulder County Coroner's office said an autopsy will be expected in a couple of months.

While the cause of Whalen's death is yet to be determined,brain injury experts said it is possible that people who suffered from a traumatic brain injury can die from a related seizure years later.

In fact, research shows that those who suffer from the most severe brain injuries are statistically more likely to die early -- from a variety of causes.

"There are a couple of lines of evidence to suggest that after a particularly acute brain injury that you have shorter life expectancy, even if you survive the acute injury phase," said Dr. Steven Flanagan, director of The Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at the New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City.

A 2007 study in the Oxford journal Brain showed 767 people admitted to a United Kingdom hospital with a traumatic brain injury were twice as likely to die as the general population in seven years following the injury.

A larger 2004 study of 2,178 patients cited in an Institute of Medicine report last year showed that people with moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries had a reduced Life expectancy by five to nine years.

However, neither study could specify whether the premature death was related to the brain injury or not.

Flanagan said doctors do know, "The longer you survive after traumatic brain injury, the more that risk of early death decreases."