CHICAGO — There are no bomb blasts or collisions with burly linemen in Susan Contreras’ past. Her headaches, memory loss and bouts of confused thinking were a mystery until doctors suggested a probable cause: domestic violence.
A former partner repeatedly beat her, she said.
“He would hit me mainly in the head so that nobody would see the injuries. He’d hit me in the back of the head so the bruises wouldn’t show,” the Phoenix woman said.
The abuse from her ex-partner took a heavy emotional toll, Contreras said. But even though he sometimes knocked her out, she hadn’t considered that her brain might have been as damaged as her psyche.
“Honestly, there’s so many holes in my memory, thinking problems,” she said. “My memory is really gone.”
Brain trauma in domestic violence survivors has been overshadowed by concerns about injuries in Iraq war vets, and by effects of repeated head blows in football players. Experts said they believe many cases go undetected and untreated in abused women, making them vulnerable to problems with thinking, mood and behavior.
Advocates said the injuries leave some survivors so impaired that they can’t manage their jobs and lives. Some even end up homeless.
About 25 percent of U.S. women and 14 percent of men have experienced severe physical assaults by a partner in their lifetime, including hitting, punching, being slammed against something hard or pushed down stairs, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Head and neck injuries are among the most common, and data suggest that domestic assaults may cause traumatic brain injuries in at least 60 percent of survivors, according to a research review published this year in the journal Family & Community Health.
Traumatic brain injuries can result from even a single sudden blow to the head. The symptoms may be short-term or long-lasting, and repeated assaults increase chances for permanent neurological damage. Whether that damage can cause the downward spiral that domestic violence survivors sometimes get caught in is unproven, but studies have found these brain injuries are more common in homeless people than in the general population. And there’s no dispute that they can cause life-changing disabilities.
“This population is not unlike that of our athletes,” said Dr. Javier Cardenas, director of a brain injury program at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. He’s a trauma consultant for the National Football League and also treats domestic violence survivors.
Cardenas cited Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Rice’s 2014 attack on his then-fiancee, caught on an elevator video camera. Much of the public discussion about the incident was about whether brain injuries in football players may be linked to violent behavior off the field. It overlooked a more obvious injury.
“When Janay Rice was knocked out cold in the elevator, attention was all about how Ray Rice had previous concussions. Nobody mentioned that the woman in the elevator suffered a brain injury right in front of everybody’s eyes,” Cardenas said.
Traumatic brain injuries include concussions and don’t always cause loss of consciousness or damage that can be detected on imaging scans. Symptoms may not occur immediately but can develop over time, making it difficult sometimes to link them with previous abuse.
The brain isn’t a hard, fixed organ. It’s more like jello, surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid that works like a shock absorber when the head is hit. A violent blow — from colliding with a linebacker’s helmet, from blast pressure after an explosion, or from a partner’s angry fist — can damage brain cells at the point of impact and slam the brain against the skull, sometimes bruising tissue, tearing nerve fibers, or causing bleeding.
