What is Higher Brain Dysfunction？
If you encounter a traffic accident and lose your consciousness by striking your head, even if your consciousness recovers, your character may change, or your memory and attention may degrade, causing difficulties in your daily life and social life.
(1) Degraded cognitive capacity
Cause of extremely poor memory
So-called memory and memory impairments, such as the inability to remember dates, important locations, names of people, the inability to remember recent events, and inability to remember the daily schedule
Attention disorders
Symptoms include a lack of attention and interest in the people and events around you, making of many simple mistakes, easy to get distracted, cannot do two things at the same time
Disabilities in functional performance
判断力が極端に低下して、自分で計画を立ててものごとを実行することができない、人に指示してもらわないとできない、約束の時間に間に合わないなど
The judgment is extremely low and can't do what have planned by myself, can't do it without people's instructions, can't meet the promised time, etc.
（２）Change in personality
- Short temper, emotional, and instantaneous changes in emotion
- Cases of sudden rage and violence
- May act childishly and show no remorse for actions
- Pathological jealousy, delusions of harm
（３）Physical symptoms
Instability when standing and walking
This is said to occur if the head is strongly struck due to a traffic accident and the brain is damaged for a certain period of time, causing brain contusion, subarachnoid hemorrhage, diffuse axonal damage etc... resulting in damage to the brain, and loss of consciousness for a certain period of time.
The main elements that are referred to when identifying aftereffects are as follows.
- Degree of consciousness impairment at the time of the accident
- Head MRI, CT images from immediately after an accident
- EEG, intelligence tests, tests for dementia, psychological test, neurological test
- Changes in the victim's daily life status, career status, and social life before and after the accident (this should be checked by physicians, families, caregivers, etc.)
- In the case of physical symptoms, the extent and degree of paralysis, whether or not the patient was cared for, and the degree of paralysis.
Grading includes not separating cognitive impairment, personality change, and physical dysfunction, but comprehensively evaluating the degree of work and daily life limitations.
For example, if the disability is severe, the person is in a state of bedridden or wheelchair life due to severe dementia and quadriplegia, and the movement around him/her that is necessary for maintaining his/her life always requires the care of another person, the disability is classified in Class I, Item 1, according to the level of disability aftereffects of the liability insurance.