Definitions: Brain Injury Legal Glossary “P”

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Paralysis: Neurologic muscular weakness or dysfunction to the point of immobility. With lack of movement, muscles begin to contract and become smaller or atrophic. Paralysis of the extremities on one side of the body is called hemiplegia and paralysis of all four extremities is called quadriplegia.

Parietal: Complex lobe of the cerebrum; serves many functions; puts together verbal/visual information to make reading possible and plays a role in tactile sensation.

Penetrating Injuries: Injuries which occur when the skull becomes broken and an object such as a skull fragment or bullet penetrates the dura mater and brain tissue.

Penetrating Skull Fracture: A brain injury in which an object pierces the skull and injures brain tissue.

Persistent Vegetative State: An ongoing state of severely impaired consciousness, in which the patient is incapable of voluntary motion.

PIA : One of the three membranes holding the brain together.

Plasticity: Ability of the brain to adapt to deficits and injury.

Pons: The part of the hindbrain that acts as the information link between the forebrain and cerebellum.

Post Traumatic Epilepsy: A type of seizure disorder occurring in greater than 5 percent of patients who suffer head trauma. The more severe the injury, the greater the likelihood that seizures will appear. Seizures may consist of motor or sensory activity, emotional states or a combination.

Post Concussion Syndrome: A group of symptoms occurring after mild head injury that may persist for days, weeks or months.

Post- Traumatic Amnesia: The period after being unconscious when there may be confused behavior and no continuous memory of day to day events.

Post-Traumatic Dementia: A condition marked by mental deterioration and emotional apathy following trauma.

Post-Traumatic Epilepsy: Recurrent seizures occurring more than 1 week after a traumatic brain injury.

Procedural: The ability to learn rule-based or automatic behavioral sequences, such as motor skills, conditioned responses, certain kinds of rule-based puzzles and perceptual motor tasks, and to carry out sequences for running/operating things.

Proprioception: The sensory awareness of the position of body parts with or without movement.

Prosodic Dysfunction: Problems with speech intonation or inflection.

Prosody: Stress, intonation, intensity and duration of voice that signals linguistic qualities; melody of speech caused by modifications of pitch, quality, strength and duration affecting mainly stress and intonational patterns.