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One of the authors, Dr. Douglas Smith, who directs the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, called the findings vindication for the patients who have been studied and treated there.

Many of those patients have felt “under assault” as a result of skeptical reporting about their symptoms and suggestions they are making them up.

“People outside keep making claims that this is psychological. This might give them some peace and some vindication that there is something real there and it is not just in their heads,” said Smith.

“Everyone who examined these patients feels this was real from a neurological point of view, that this was a true neurological disorder.”

Researchers found, among other things, that the patients, who suffered from concussion-like symptoms, had significantly smaller brain white matter than the control group. White matter is the tissue that contains nerve fibers that connect parts of the brain and signal nerves to talk to each other. Researchers found some changes similar to the brains of concussion patients, which did not surprise them, said Smith.

But they found something else, which Smith said is unique — changes to the signals that help nerves to communicate.

In concussion patients, there might be swelling in the long fibres contained in white matter, researchers found the opposite in the Havana patients they studied. Although further study would have to confirm it, the findings raise the possibility that the brains of Havana patients might have a lower percentage of water in their brain’s white matter, which is significant.