Research scientists at the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas have just published a study, funded by the US Department of Defense, supporting the effectiveness of “strategy-based” cognitive training at reducing symptoms of depression commonly found in patients with chronic (greater than 6 months) traumatic brain injury (TBI) symptoms.
The training was an integrative program designed to improve cognitive control by exerting more efficient thinking strategies for selective attention and abstract reasoning. The training did not directly target psychiatric symptoms such as depression, but was nonetheless effective at reducing those symptoms. Read More
Although prior studies of the association between mTBI and dementia have been mixed, this study, among the largest epidemiological studies to date, adds to the weight of evidence suggesting that even mild TBI is associated with an increased dementia diagnosis risk. Read More
Although males represent a majority of emergency department visits for sports and recreation-related concussion, researchers have recently found that female athletes have a higher rate of concussion and appear to have worse outcomes than their male counterparts participating in the same sport. University of Pennsylvania researchers have recently identified anatomical differences between male and female axons that may explain this increased vulnerability. Read More
Canadian researchers assessed 236 individuals diagnosed with traumatic brain injury at 4, 8 and 12 months following injury. The results confirm prior studies showing that depression in very prevalent following TBI. Read More
As discussed in prior posts on this blog, sleep alterations are commonly found after a concussion or other traumatic brain injury, both short term and in some cases long term. One of the most well documented impacts of concussion, also discussed in prior posts, is an increased risk of mood disturbances, including depression, increased anxiety and increased risk of suicide. In recent years researchers have turned to sleep studies to explore the connection between these symptoms.
There is substantial evidence in the literature of the role healthy sleep plays in the “consolidation” of emotional memories. At first blush, this research is counter-intuitive. If sleep “consolidates” emotional memories, doesn’t this have the potential to increase rather than decrease mood disturbance? The answer appears to be that, although sleep preserves memory of events associated with emotional experience, at the same time it weakens the emotional “charge” coating the experience (referred to in the literature as “valence”) in a process called “habituation.” As one researcher hypothesized, “we sleep to forget the emotional tone, yet sleep to remember the tagged information.”Read More
Several of my traumatic brain injury (TBI) clients have been treated for gut issues – issues that were not present prior to their TBI. Insurers, of course, insist that this treatment cannot be related to the brain injury. The scientific literature indicates otherwise. Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine recently found a two-way link between TBI and intestinal changes.
The findings indicate that this two way interaction may contribute to increased infections in TBI patients and may also worsen chronic brain damage. Read More
A treatment protocol combining Ritalin, a stimulant commonly used for ADHD, and a form of Cognitive Behavioral Rehabilitation known as “Memory and Attention Adaptation Training” (MAAT) shows great promise for improving persistent traumatic brain injury (TBI) symptoms, including attention, episodic and working memory and executive function. The research supporting this finding, led by Thomas McAllister and Brenna McDonald at the Indiana School of Medicine, was published in 2017 in the journal of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. Read More
Although the primary focus of this blog is on “traumatic” brain injury, the literature increasingly demonstrates that the physiological causes of cognitive impairment overlap between a range of conditions having neurodegenerative consequences, including TBI, PTSD, Alzheimer’s disease and “Chemobrain”. (Chronic inflammation appears to be one of the common variables, as discussed in prior posts.) Read More
A review published in the September 2017 issue of Frontiers in Neurology proposes use of “systems science” to better understand concussion diagnosis and prognosis. This is a discipline that analyzes complex problems as whole systems and integrates research findings from different disciplines. In explaining the need for a systems approach, the reviewers note one description of concussion that is uniformly recognized – that it is a highly heterogeneous phenomenon, with numerous factors interacting dynamically to influence an individual’s recovery trajectory. (This concept is highlighted in the title of one of the Concussion WebCasts made available by the American Association of Family Physicians : “If you have seen one concussion, you have seen one concussion.”) Read More
The open source journal Brain Science has just published a survey of literature demonstrating that a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) , otherwise known as concussion, is a complex pathophysiological process that can have a systemic effect on the body aside from solely impairing cognitive function. According to the article, “dysfunction in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) has been found to be a major factor in the symptomatology in TBI, including in mTBI” and can “induce abnormalities in organ systems throughout the body.” Read More
