The Brazilian loses 11% of his brain and lives and becomes a scientific study

The recovery of a worker from Rio de Janeiro who lost 11% of his brain after his head was punctured by rebar in 2012 became a scientific study that should serve as a basis for helping other injured people in the world.

Eduardo Litt was a pilgrim at a construction site on August 16, 2012, wearing a protective helmet, when he was injured. The rebar she hit fell 2.5 meters from a height of 15 meters, entered from the top of his head and exited between his eyes with an impact of nearly 300 kilograms.

Carioca was taken to the hospital, underwent a six-hour operation, and was discharged from the hospital two weeks after his admission. Since he was only the second medical condition of its kind in history, doctors began to monitor his recovery, deeming it successful.

“It was very surprising. During these ten years, Eduardo maintained a constant regularity, his family relationship and his relationship with the people in the neighborhood remained the same during these ten years,” Vuecruz researcher Renato Rosenthal said in an interview with Fantástico.

Experts suspect that the prefrontal cortex, which damaged the armature rod and impaired electrical activity after losing 11% of brain mass, was “compensated” by another part of the brain.

“What we saw in this case is that the other half, which is healthy, can modulate and compensate for this electrical activity. Until then, a mechanism had never been described in which we’ve seen one side of the cortex modulate the other,” explained Dr. Pedro Henrique de Freitas.

A series of tests were conducted on Eduardo over the course of 10 years of recovery. In partnership with researchers from the United States, the Brazilians confirmed the suspicion that one side of the brain “compensates” for the activity of the other.

Today, the worker has difficulty only performing tasks that simultaneously require both sides of the brain. Now, the study on the recovery of Brazilians will be published in the scientific journal The Lancet, one of the world’s most famous.

Based on this finding, clinicians will look for strategies to reproduce brain compensation in trauma patients such as brain attackStrokes and other miscellaneous injuries. It is expected that within 15 years they will be able to provide external modifiers capable of carrying out this activity.