The best magazine
The Heads-Up on Roller Coasters
Aug. 15, 2000 -- Middle-aged thrill seekers may want to skip the new breed of faster and steeper roller coaster rides when they visit amusement parks, say Italian researchers. If a recent patient they examined is a barometer of the effects of the coasters, they just may cause bleeding in the brain or other other brain injuries.
In the Aug. 14 edition of TheJournal of the American Medical Association, physicians tell of an otherwise healthy 47-year-old male who developed severe nausea and dizziness after riding a high-speed roller coaster that swung him violently numerous times during the ride. Not terribly concerned at the time, within a week he suffered severe headaches as well as nausea and vomiting.
When his symptoms continued for four days, the University of Florence Hospital admitted him for tests. A scan of his head showed he had bleeding in two areas of his brain. He received treatment for a week and was discharged from the hospital, complaining of only a mild headache.
"This was an unexpected event caused by a ride in a roller coaster, in an otherwise normal middle-aged man," researcher Domenico Inzitari tells WebMD. Inzitari, chief of the department of neurology at the University of Florence Medical School, said the patient -- who was also a physician -- could not think of anything else that he had recently experienced that could have caused the trauma. Inzitari declined to reveal the roller coaster or the amusement park the patient had visited.
Though this was only one incident, Inzitari says he believes there may be others where patients didn't relate their symptoms to the ride. He also expects there may be more to come. "We think that the risk of serious [brain injury] after a roller coaster ride is underestimated," says Inzitari. "Especially with the modern high-speed ones. It may be this risk could be even greater in elderly people or in those treated with [blood thinners], as pointed out by other case reports."
For instance, in the June 1995 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine, Canadian researchers reported that after eleven roller coaster rides, a 64-year-old Canadian man developed headaches so bad he had to stop riding. After they didn't subside for a few days, the man sought medical treatment. Tests showed that the cause of the headache was a pool of blood trapped between the brain and the skull, called a subdural hematoma. Neurosurgeons surgically drained the blood and the headache disappeared.
Source: ...