The difference, I suspect, is that rather than the injury being confined to a specific place that has a lesion in the brain, it's rather the entire brain that gets affected.
I was in a car accident ~7 years ago that effectively erased 5 days of my life from my memory, and took me 6 months to fully recover from (though I suspect I'm still not quite the same as I was before the accident, but as far as anyone else can tell I am). The only physical remnant from that accident is a small scar on my scalp.
One of the things I learned from the doctors that attempted to assess the damage to my brain is that the number of TBIs caused by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan very much informed and changed the way that doctors treat TBIs here in the states.
Also, always wear a seat belt, whatever the circumstances. I'd be dead if I hadn't been wearing one.
I'm asking this purely out of curiosity and to foster discussion: what is about this aspect of the article you find unconvincing? Thanks!
The symptoms, on the other hand seem very very similar. The progressive degradation in cognitive ability with exposure to explosions is (to my admittedly untrained eye) exactly the same as that of multiple concussions.
Which is not to say I didn't find this article interesting. I think the key difference between TBIs caused by explosions and those due to physical trauma is purely because there's no obvious lesion on the brain visible in a scan. As a result, the military treated it differently, which the article points out was a fundamental error that the military has now taken steps to correct.
This is an additional mechanism, heretofore unidentified, causing a significantly different injury than concussion.