No paper seems to explain the difference in neural response to these different types of forces imposed on neurons. Would you see more secondary damage in one of them or would they result in very similar damage and neural response?
I have always thought of it as: Shearing is what happens when stretching goes too far. Theoretically stretching would result in slower but still accurate responses, while shearing would result in errors. But in terms of real world performance I doubt that it would be easy to distinguish between the two as most TBIs would result in a mixture of these conditions within the brain.
Given that most of the micro bleeds visualised occur at frontier of grey/white matters or very mobile structures neighbouring rather robust tissue (e.g. corpus callous, tentorium cerebelli) I'd opt for shearing injury, which is supported by the neuropathological findings of Hume Evans in the early 70s. Stretching respects largely the direction of the axons (e.g. upper plexus injury in motorcyclists), whereas DAI seems to attack tangentially.
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