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WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2009 (Health.com) — Alcohol, a drug that is a major cause of accidents, may actually protect the brain from a life-threatening injury when an accident does occur, according to a study published this week in Archives of Surgery.

In the study of 38,000 patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries who were admitted to U.S. hospitals between 2000 and 2005, 38% had alcohol in their blood. Such patients had a lower risk of dying of their injuries than those who hadn’t been drinking.

“This study really brings up more questions than it answers,” says coauthor Ali Salim, MD, the program director of the General Surgery Residency Educational Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. “It’s a bad thing to say alcohol is good, especially since it’s responsible for so many of these injuries. But our study suggests there may be some survival advantage for people with elevated [blood alcohol] levels.”

Each year, about 2 million people in the U.S. experience traumatic brain injuries, and 56,000 die and 80,000 are permanently impaired as a result. Alcohol plays a role in 40% of fatal car crashes, and half of patients hospitalized for trauma are intoxicated at the time of injury.

The study may help experts develop therapies for traumatic brain injuries, but it has important limitations as well, Dr. Salim says.

Patients in the study who had been drinking were younger, had less severe injuries, and spent less time on a ventilator or in an intensive care unit than other patients. (Alcohol, however, still seemed to protect the brain after taking these factors into account.) Overall, 9.7% of people who hadn’t been drinking died after a brain injury, compared with 7.7% of those with alcohol in their blood.

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