What would cause symptoms as TBI if you never hit your head?

Hi, @whoppi12, and welcome to Mayo Clinic Connect. Since you mentioned dementia symptoms with your son, I also added this discussion to the Early Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment support group on Connect, so members there also can offer support and insights.

Your son is fortunate to have you helping to figure this all out for him.

So, to clarify, your son had some dementia symptoms before he hit his head in a car? What symptoms was he experiencing, and was he given a diagnosis?

After experiencing these symptoms, he hit his head in a car, perhaps in an accident?

Welcome, June @whoppi12 ~
Thank you for posting here. I'm going to echo what Lisa said; I am grateful that your son has you. Caring for someone with a TBI or any debilitating situation can be difficult. I look forward to hearing more details. As food for thought, I have spoken with a few people who claim that many of us sustain concussions or mild TBIs and do not realize it. I am curious to hear examples of the dementia symptoms he was experiencing before the accident. And was he ever seen by a physician or neurologist for these symptoms? Thank you again for posting. I hope you are blessed with strength, wisdom, perseverance, and love.

In my case, I have a TBI from being hit by a bicyclist in 2014. A year or two later, I began to experience anomic aphasia. Though I haven't been seen by a doctor for this, I know, from years of reading and experience that it is anomic aphasia. I can be in a conversation, or writing or thinking about anything and, at some point, there may be a word, a name or a phrase I want to use, but it's just "not there." This will typically continue for seconds, minutes, or in rare cases, hours before the word pops into my mind. It's frustrating more than anything, as it impairs my ability to communicate. Those people who know nothing about anomic aphasia will assume the problem is "memory loss," but the memories are still there. The problem is one of recall and most people think memory and recall are the same thing, but they are not. The fact that I recover and say the word just moments later proves the memory is still intact. As for my memories, everything I see, hear or directly experience will become a part of my long-term memory. I have an undiagnosed case of Hyperthymesia and revisit memories from as long ago as age 4, sometimes whether I want to or not. Yet, despite this, anomic aphasia is a problem for me because it doesn't involve my visual or auditory senses. It is only words, whether written or read, that are affected. Some words (and names) seem to give me more trouble than others, but I will eventually recall them. It just takes longer.

@garyr443 Thank you for providing further insight. I actually have a similar difficulty with word retrieval. I've had it most of my life. I really began getting worse when I was a young adult. There was moment when I looked out on Puget Sound and saw a ship. But I couldn't think of the word for sails. I turned to my husband and said, "Those white things on the ship." It was the first time I realized that this was truly a problem. It has gotten worse with age. I forget a person's name (that I know and know) or a object. I haven't discovered a way around it. BUT I have made peace with it. Relaxing and acceptance does help me recover words. One time I was in church and I saw a person that I knew I knew, but couldn't remember his name. It was a special situation because of some encouragement he had provided regarding my son. I prayed, "Dear God, help me remember his name because I don't want him to feel bad. And, he needs to see how well my son is doing. He needs to know that his words were important." I prayed without stress. With trust. With resignation. And then...his name came. So, I guess the only way I have found to help myself is to relax when I cannot recall something I know I know. If I discover anything else, you'll be the first to know! God bless you.

@marialara Speaking of Seattle (where I've lived since 2009) and anomic aphasia, street names have been a recurring problem for me. But, after repeated practice, I finally have Union St. and Virginia Ave. down. Why those two, I have no idea. I recently tried a method of making sure I don't have problems with a neighbor's name, which is Beverly. Knowing that I have Hyperthymesia, I took advantage of this by looking at her face (okay, got the visual, there) while saying to her, "I won't forget this, Beverly," which, in my own voice, captured the auditory component. So, now I am able to see her face, hear my voice saying "Beverly" and I can recite her name any time I want to. It might not work for anyone who doesn't have Hyperthymesia, but it could be a way to train yourself to recall names or words you have trouble with. When I drill myself for "Union" and "Virginia," I visualize the street signs, or the marquee in the bus when either street is coming up next.

Some kind of chemical or dietary cause would be my guess, though I have never heard of such a case. All kinds of things can affect brain functioning, other than a blow to the head.

@marialara Seems like it’s a matter of waiting for the neural pathways to reroute themselves and tissue and that new 3rd variable to grow back. Much like the guy outside in the winter storm (see Blizzard of 96) manually directing traffic at the cross signal of the train tracks who took an extended vacation due to bad conditions or union rules. As soon as he returns to work, another injury occurs and no one to reroute traffic all over again, thus causing delays in word retrieval. That word sitting at the interchange may finally come minutes or days later or maybe months, and you blurt it out and get accused of interrupting, meanwhile the searching mid conversation and concentration and focus required to express a full thought an extra long time to deliver at times, or comes split in tiny packets, much like the internet, and requires multiple sentences to reassemble that thought. People around you pressure you are done or are impatient and interrupt you, then gas light and say uninterrupted them when you were mid sentence and they began hijacking your point into some other direction you were not headed. Or worse, taking your symptoms and applying some other armchair diagnosis of a mental health issue not the case at all, or misread your efforts if enthusiasm as some hostility not the case at all.

You get interrupted by the impatience of others, lose your train of thought, thought words that went through such an extra long route to make it around the “mountain”, then lose half the cars on the train that are your words/points, and being so very tired from all that efforting.

Not an intelligence issue, or memory per say, but poor training of the world around those with a TBI and lack of patience, empathy or knowledge base, meanwhile, an important conversation like a call to an insurance company, can be so resource-heavy that you need a nap. The spacing out your thought between other people’s thoughts makes you lose the entire train route entirely that was your one thought, or speaking fast to get out the words before your forget /lose retrieval ability for another lengthy time, you get accused of speaking to fast and lack of understanding by others whose brains don’t work so rapidly, or handle the complex cargo that your brain has to carry with fewer train routes making it out the other side per day, only the really important trans getting priority, making communication roadblocks with an undereducated family or dealing with poor listeners much more frequent. (No longer just a face to a name, but that there too). —My experience anyway, after more than one TBI, and years learning how this is the case and the ongoing, extended path to recovery. (In my case, I suddenly also cannot edit down words.)