It appeared to be an ordinary fall: Bob Saget, the actor and comedian, knocked his head on something and, perhaps thinking nothing of it, went to sleep, his family said earlier this month.
But the chilling consequences — Saget, 65, died some hours later Jan. 9 from blunt head trauma, a medical examiner ruled — have underscored the dangers of traumatic brain injuries, even those that do not initially seem to be causes for alarm.
Some 61,000 deaths in 2019 were related to traumatic brain injuries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and nearly half of head trauma-related hospitalizations result from falls.