Brain injury after head trauma is one of the leading causes of disability due to neurological disease.
Common long-lasting symptoms show similarities to symptoms accompanying dysfunction of a hormone gland in the head, the pituitary. Therefore, it was previously recommended to evaluate the pituitary function of all people having undergone a head injury. However, this thesis shows that unselected pituitary screening is not indicated.
Another approach towards a better understanding of this complex disease is to map brain injury using advanced MRI techniques such as DTI and SWI. This thesis shows that DTI provides information on the type of injury to the white matter, which contains the pathways through which brain regions communicate. SWI provides information on microbleeds. Already in an early phase microbleeds provide information that is related to white matter injury in a later phase. When evaluating an SWI scan, uncertain microbleeds should be disregarded in most cases.
Anke van der Eerden (1977) obtained her medical degree at Radboud University in 2006 and then worked at the departments of Endocrine Diseases and Neurology where she started her PhD research. Since 2008 she performs her research activities alongside her radiological work at Radboudumc, Rijnstate, Hôpital Pitié Salpêtrière, AvL, VieCuri and her current work as a neuroradiologist at Erasmus MC.