View clinical trials related to Brain Injuries.
Filter by:The FBRI VTC Neuromotor Research Clinic was established and opened in May of 2013 to provide intensive therapeutic services to individuals with motor impairment secondary to neuromotor disorders. It is direct by Dr. Stephanie DeLuca and based on the principles surrounding ACQUIREc Therapy. ACQUIREc Therapy is an evidenced-based approach to pediatric constraint-induced movement therapy, which refers to a multi-component form of therapy that is focused on helping children who have asymmetric motor abilities between the two sides of the body. Historically, ACQUIREc Therapy has the unimpaired or less impaired upper extremity constrained (by a cast or a splint) while also receiving active therapy from a specially trained therapist who shapes new skills and functional activities with the child's more impaired upper extremity but who is also a licensed Occupational or Physical Therapist (OT/PT). Therapy dosages are high much higher than tradition OT or PT - often lasting many hours per day, up to 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 2-4 weeks. Investigators have developed further treatments based on the same principles of intensive services combined with behavior shaping for other areas of the body that are also affected by weakness (e.g., the leg and trunk) also, but which usually do not involve constraint. These have been more generally labeled ACQUIRE Therapy. All forms involve intensive, play-based therapy for children with asymmetric motor impairments of the arms and hands. The primary focus of treatment is to facilitate the acquisition of new motor skills in the child's weaker body parts through high levels of intensive therapy using scientifically-based behavioral guidelines. Therapy is also delivered in naturalistic environments. ACQUIREc Therapy as a treatment method has been tested in two randomized controlled trials, and a specific manual for its implementation has been developed. Dr. (s) Ramey and DeLuca previously founded a similar clinic, The Pediatric Neuromotor Research Clinic, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where Dr. DeLuca directed the research clinic for 13 years and oversaw the implementation of the ACQUIREc Therapy treatment protocol in more than 400 cases. This research will involve analyzing and interpreting the clinical data of children going through clinical procedures at the FBRI VTC Neuromotor Research Clinic. All participation is voluntary and no children will denied services if families choose not to participate.
Difficulty to sustain attention over a prolonged period of time is one of the core difficulties experienced by people who have undergone traumatic brain injury. Rehabilitation of attention is often based on compensatory strategies, because of the limited impact of cognitive training on improving attentional capacity after brain injury. New therapeutic approaches to explore the plastic recovery of the brain after injury, and consequent performance improvement, are warranted. Neurofeedback (NFB) allows the self-regulation of brain activity using visual feedback. Very recently, it has been demonstrated that NFB training targeted at reducing alpha power (alpha desynchronization NFB), can induce initial plastic changes in brain networks associated with attention. It has been proposed that NFB can improve cognitive performance by tuning oscillatory activity of the brain towards a more healthy balance between neural network flexibility and stability. It is speculated that the use of alpha desynchronization NFB training, with people who present with brain injury, can enhance sustained attention in as much as the training promotes neural variability during resting state (i.e. more flexible network configuration) and neural stability during a sustained attention task (i.e. more stable network configuration). However, before assessing the effectiveness of the intervention, it is necessary to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability thereof. This study will recruit 14 participants and randomly assign them to two groups: a NFB group and a video games control group. Long-term changes will be evaluated at two time points for both groups: baseline and post-intervention. The NFB group will have a follow-up session one week after the intervention, to evaluate whether there are long lasting changes after NFB training. In addition, short-term changes of NFB will be evaluated for the experimental group, contrasting EEG activity immediately before and after the last NFB session.
Preliminary evaluation of electrodes placed on the brain for recording brain activity and novel algorithms to determine cortical spreading depolarization foci of origination following severe traumatic brain injury requiring neurosurgical intervention.
People with acquired brain injury (ABI) often experience persistent language challenges that are subtle in nature and not readily observable to others. These challenges can have substantial negative effects on vocational and social endeavors despite their subtlety. Even though these challenges are prevalent in the ABI population, limited methods exist for quantifying and remediating them. The two purposes of Phase I of this research are to (a) explore methods of using event related potential (ERP) recordings to quantify language processing differences between people with and without ABI and (b) correlate behavioral observations from language tests with ERP findings. The purpose of Phase II is to explore the use of game-based, group activities as an intervention for people with ABI who experience word-retrieval challenges. The purpose of Phase III is to collect post-intervention data for comparison with Phase I data and provide evidence about the effectiveness of the intervention program.
The purpose of this single center, longitudinal, pilot study is to provide evidence for the use of an eye tracking system as an objective tool to identify mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) related oculomotor dysfunction (OMD) and predict the effectiveness of neurovision rehabilitation (NVR) of OMD. Eye tracking visual stimulus measurements will be compared to objective developmental optometrist (OD) diagnosis and assessments. It will be determined whether an eye tracking system can predict the presence or absence of mTBI related OMD and whether mTBI patients who have OMD based on the eye tracking system will respond positively to NVR.
The purpose of the study is to assess the usability and tolerability of this jugular vein compression device in a population of helmeted and non-helmeted competitive high school, collegiate and professional athletes in the sports of football and rugby. This study differs from previous work in that it is designed to capture additional data related to the athlete experience wearing the jugular vein compression device in older and more elite playing levels.
1. Validation of translated Motor Imagery ability questionnaire MIQ-RS 2. Investigating the Motor Imagery ability in patients with traumatic brain injury
Persistent headache is one of the most common debilitating symptoms in military personnel suffering from mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI). This study aims to assess the long-term effect of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in managing MTBI related headaches for up to 2-3 months by comparing the treatment effect of active-rTMS to sham-rTMS.
Brain injury is a frequent purpose for consultation in emergency services. Management of brain injury is time and resource consuming, combining clinical monitoring and imaging. The stage prior to the management of the victims of brain injury is stratification of the severity, potential or proven. Severe brain injury requires emergent brain CT-scan, ideally within one hour of the first medical contact. Patients requiring this strategy present with focused neurological deficit, Glasgow score <15 to 2 hours after the trauma, suspicion of open fracture of the skull or dish pan fracture, any signs of fracture of the skull base (hemotympanum, bilateral peri-orbital ecchymosis), otorrhea or rhinorrhea of cerebrospinal fluid, more than one episode of vomiting in adults, and posttraumatic convulsion. Patients benefiting from anticoagulant therapy are included in this category. Victims of brain injury that do not fall into this category are considered less critical. By definition, mild traumatic brain injury : - a trauma of the cephalic extremity : - whose Glasgow score (30 min after the trauma or during the consultation) is 13-15, - associated with one or more of the following: confusion; disorientation; loss of consciousness of 30 min or less; post-traumatic amnesia of less than 24 hours; other transient neurological abnormalities (focal signs, epileptic seizures, non-surgical intracranial lesion). Among these patients, some are considered at risk of developing intracerebral lesions. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the prevalence of hemorrhagic complications is radically different between patients with a Glasgow score of 13 and those with a score of 15. Thus, the recommendations suggest a brain scan without injection of contrast media within 4 to 8 hours for patients with the following characteristics : - a retrograde amnesia of more than 30 minutes, - a loss of consciousness or amnesia associated with: - either a risk mechanism (pedestrian overturned by a motor vehicle, ejection of a vehicle, falling by more than one meter), - or an age> 65 years, - or coagulation disorders, including the use of platelet aggregation therapy. Patients who fall outside this definition are considered low risk of complication and should not benefit of imaging. Data from the scientific literature show that an early brain CT-scan allows identification of post-traumatic lesions in this population. Nevertheless, organizational problems, including the availability of the imaging, radiation, and disruption of surveillance related to patient displacement, are limitations to this strategy. In contrast, the low cost-effectiveness of CT scan is often advocated in patients with mild traumatic brain injury. For example, in the Octopus study, 52 of 1316 patients who received CT scan after mild head trauma had an intracerebral lesion. Among these patients, 39 (3%) had intracerebral lesion related to trauma; for 13 (1%) patients, the link with the trauma was uncertain. In fact, the search of alternatives for a safer, more conservative, more efficient practice, one of the objectives of which is to limit the undue use of cerebral scanning. Thus, many teams have been interested in the use of biological variables to guide the decision to use imagery. Among candidate biomarkers, the S100B protein has been the subject of many evaluations which allow it to be used in current practice. Indeed, the increase of the S100B protein carried out within 3 hours following a mild head trauma makes it possible to identify the patients at risk of intracerebral lesion and to target the indications of imaging. The purpose of the registry is to describe the use, interpretation and performance of the S100B protein in its use at bedside in emergency medicine.
The purpose of this two phase study is to evaluate comprehension by people with acquired brain injury. The phase 1 portion of the study will examine comprehension of narrative paragraphs under 3 conditions: (a) written text only, (b) auditory output only (i.e., synthetic speech - David voice) or combined written text and auditory output. The phase 2 portion of the study is to evaluate comprehension of sentences and paragraphs produced with computer generated (synthesized) speech and digitized natural speech after multiple exposures.