Spectrin Breakdown Products in the Investigation of Blast Induced Traumatic Brain Injury

Blast injury has become the ‘signature injury’ of modern conflict, and there is increasing concern that within this injured population mild to severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is becoming more prevalent. TBI is difficult to diagnose using conventional diagnostic methods. One component of a blast, the blast wave, has been associated with TBI. This has led to a suspicion of a subset of blast‐exposed personnel who appear uninjured, but then develop TBI. Consequently, there has been much research into the use biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis of TBI. αII-Spectrin is a 240kDa cytoskeletal protein found in the cell membrane of neurons. Spectrin is irreversibly cleaved by the action of the proteases Calpain and Caspase, producing 145kDa and 120kDa Spectrin Breakdown Product (SBDP) respectively. The aim of this study was to see if a blast wave to the head would produce SBDPs of interest and if they could be found in the Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) and plasma. Terminally anaesthetised rats were subjected to a blast wave to the head; an equally sized control group was used. Blood was periodically sampled and at eight hours post‐injury the brains, CSF and plasma were collected. Western Blot Gel Electrophoresis was used to identify SBDP in brain homogenate, CSF and plasma. SBDP 145 and 120 were identified in brain homogenate and in plasma in blast and control groups, but there were no significant differences between groups. This suggests that blast exposure per se does not specifically lead to elevations in SBDP. It was not possible to reliably assess SBDPs in CSF due to blood contamination. This study did not provide evidence that SBDPs are a reliable indicator of any TBI caused by a blast wave to the head in the acute phase, although they may have a role in polytrauma

’Nowhere else sells bliss like this’: Exploring the emotional labour of soldiers at war

Reading secondary data from military memoirs of recent conflicts through the prism of scholarship on emotional labour, this paper discusses feeling rules fostered by the total institution of military service. The military is a significant context for such analysis, given that it socializes its personnel into mastering the practices and skills of lethal violence for combat operations. It is, moreover, a total institution, and the disculturation new recruits must endure creates fertile ground for the inculcation of a specific emotional regime. Further, unlike most other service occupations, the military is both male‐dominated and highly masculine. The paper also makes a case for using memoirs in the study of emotional labour. Being examples of what we call identity writing, they offer different insights to those we might attain through other methods. Indeed, we argue that memoirs provide a fruitful source for future organization studies research into the emotional regime of the military especially. Third, our discussion expands the concept of emotional labour in that the emotional regime the memoirists index: is not undertaken for a specific group of customers; entails a distinctive range of emotions; and involves the conscious cultivation of gendered communities of coping among soldiers