Active clinical trials for "Brain Injuries"

The purpose of this study is to innovatively design and develop computerized dual-task balance training modules and home modules, and conduct proactive clinical verification to focus on the effectiveness of balance control and gait stabilization strategies. It is expected that in addition to the development of the training module, a proactive study will be conducted at the same time. During the period from the fourth quarter of the first year to the second year, there will be 25 patients in the experimental group and 25 patients in the control group. A total of 50 patients will undergo preliminary efficacy analysis.

This is a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded trial in which subjects with a post concussive headache meeting inclusion criterion will be assigned to one of two treatment groups: placebo or nortriptyline. Each group will be evaluated at week 0 and again each week for the next 4 weeks of treatment with a concussion survey that rates their symptoms. At the end of 4 weeks the study will be unblinded. It is hypothesized that the addition of nortriptyline to the standard headache treatments will result in more rapid decrease of symptom score than with placebo.

This project is a Randomised Clinical Trial that includes a tactile-kinesthetic somatosensory stimulation or family centred education intervention with families of preterm infants at risk for sensori-motor disorders. This is a study will be based on the adaptation of the intervention previously described and published by Guzzetta and colleagues (2009), and will include an improved and increased kinesthetic component, to be performed in infants born very prematurely and preterm infants with a documented brain injury. The intervention will start in neonatology during the infant hospitalization and continue at the child's home until two months of correct age.

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the use of autologous Bone Marrow Derived Stem Cells (BMSC) as a means to improve cognitive impairment as occurs in Alzheimer's Disease and other dementias and to improve behavior and socialization issues which occur in adult Autism Spectrum Disorder. The use of Near Infrared Light, in conjunction with the use of BMSC, will also be assessed.

After injury, survivors of msTBI depend on informal family caregivers. Upwards of 77% of family caregivers experience poor outcomes, such as adverse life changes, poor health related quality of life, and increased depressive symptoms. Caregivers frequently report minimal support or training to prepare them for their new role. Periods of care transitions, such as ICU discharge, are most difficult. The majority (93%) of previously developed caregiver and caregiver/survivor dyad interventions after msTBI focus on providing information or practical skills to either survivors, or to long-term caregivers (>6 months post injury), rather than education, support, and skill-building that the new caregiver may use proactively that will benefit the dyad acutely after injury. The Aims of this proposal are to: (1) Determine feasibility, satisfaction, and data trends of CG-Well; and (2) Understand how baseline psychosocial risk factors affect response to CG-Well compared to an Information, Support, and Referral control group. To accomplish this, I will first enroll 6-10 caregivers and tailor CG-well until each finds the intervention acceptable, appropriate, and feasible. I will then enroll 100 (50/group) dyads and determine satisfaction ratings, recruitment, retention, and treatment fidelity of CG-Well. Additionally, I will determine if caregivers report reductions in depressive symptoms and improvements in life changes as a result of improvements in task difficulty and threat appraisal in CG-Well compared to ISR at six months. Information obtained in Aims 1 and 2 will be used to plan a larger Phase III trial of CG-Well. Completing these Aims and the training plan will improve outcomes of caregivers and downstream outcomes of survivors of msTBI, and provide me with the skillset necessary to become an independent researcher who can develop and test high-impact, high-fidelity, sustainable interventions.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant problem for U.S. Hispanic children. Compared to non-Hispanic children, Hispanic children have higher long-term disability and lower health related quality of life, even though differences are not present at hospital discharge. Rehabilitation decreases disability, but needs timely initiation, and long treatments in hospitals, community healthcare facilities and schools. Parents play a key role in their child's recovery. Hispanic parents face additional barriers to initiate and maintain outpatient treatments. They report knowledge gaps in TBI-education, community, and school support systems; language and health literacy barriers. The investigators developed, a bilingual bicultural theory-based program for Hispanic families consisting of Brain Injury Education and outpatient care Navigation (1st BIEN). It integrates in-person education enriched by video content delivered through mobile phones, with navigation during transitions to outpatient care and school return. The pilot established feasibility and acceptability of the program. This randomized control trial will determine efficacy to maintain long-term adherence to rehabilitation and reduce disability. It will enroll 150 parent-child dyads: children (6-17 y), with mild-complicated, moderate-severe TBI in 5 centers in Washington, Texas, Dallas, Utah and Oregon and their parents. Intervention group parents receive: One in-person education session, plus bi-weekly videos tailored to the child's TBI and therapies; and, 3-months of bilingual outpatient care navigation. Attention control parents receive one in person-education session, monthly well-child texts and usual institutional follow up care. Primary outcome is treatment adherence at 6 months post-discharge measured by percentage of follow-up appointments attended during the prescribed time at hospitals, and community care facilities. Secondary outcomes are functional status of the child using PROMIS parental report measures; and parental health literacy, self-efficacy, and mental health at 3, 6, and 12 months after discharge. Child's academic performance will be assessed using school records. The study evaluates a flexible and scalable intervention using mobile phones to aid transitions of care, improve treatment adherence and TBI outcomes. It addresses the needs of an understudied population and can serve as a model for TBI family centered care for at risk groups.

In efforts to assist people who have had a concussion (mild traumatic brain injury), the Parkwood Pacing and Planning™ app has been developed and tested and will be released to the public. The app uses a point system where users have a daily point maximum assigned based on symptom severity with daily activities (recorded by the users). Users can then schedule their daily activities based on their allowed points. The goal is to help users with symptom self-management by facilitating activity planning and pacing. Patients and clinicians have provided positive feedback on the initial version of the app. Using this as a foundation, the investigators envision enhancing the app to provide a more personalized user experience and to enable further discovery and innovations in the recovery from concussion. This will be accomplished through data analytics and machine-learning techniques, informed by the results of a large-scale research trial. This strategy will be used to customize the point system to facilitate the user with pacing and planning.

Unilateral neglect is a neuropsychological disorder reflected by a disturbance in the spatial exploration and distribution of directed attention affecting the contralateral part of space and body relatively to the brain lesion. The chronic aspect of this pathology leads to a poor progression following rehabilitation and a decreased independence of patients in daily life. Thus, it is necessary to set up efficient and long lasting therapies for unilateral neglect patients to improve their daily quality of life. Prismatic adaptation is now a classical method which allows patients to improve their neglect through corrective pointing movements in response to a lateral displacement of the visual field. A large and growing body of literature has investigated prismatic adaptation as a very promising rehabilitation method, improving both visuomotor and cognitive features of unilateral neglect. However, its effects are somehow irregular and clinical applications of this method are still limited. The necessity for patients to come to the hospital to take advantage of prismatic adaption sessions draws some limitations about our knowledge concerning 1) the temporal dynamic of prism adaptation effects on a long-term basis and 2) the optimal duration of treatment (most of the time constrained by the hospitalization duration) and its therapeutical effects on a very long-term basis. Moreover, a large number of patients also suffer from motor deficits which reduce the possibility to optimize the prismatic adaptation session. Thus, the aim of this project is to develop and validate others modalities of prismatic adaptation which can be applied at home and for a longer duration. These modalities should allow the investigator to get insights about the temporal dynamic of prismatic adaptation on the cognitive system. First, the investigator will investigate the effects of a prismatic adaptation modality using virtual reality to reproduce the lateral displacement induced by the prismatic goggles. He will also investigate prismatic adaptation induced by motor imagery, i.e. with mental representations of pointing movements without concomitant motor execution. This project could enhance the fundamental knowledge and enable to design new modalities of therapeutical use of prismatic adaptation (virtual or imaged) so as to allow a home-based treatment and follow-up. Thus, the aim of this project is to demonstrate the implication of similar mechanisms through different modalities (virtual and imaged compared to classical application) and the feasibility of these new modalities of healthy subjects. Thereafter, the aim will be to use knowledge acquired during this project to set up clinical trials to test for the efficiency of these modalities on a long-term basis in a pathological population.

Although, in the past years, an increasing use of ketamine in Traumatic Brain injury (TBI) has been reported as an adjunct to other sedatives, there is no evidence from randomized clinical trial to support this practice. The BIKe (Brain Injury and Ketamine) study is a double-blind placebo controlled randomized multicenter clinical trial to examine the safety and feasibility of using ketamine as an adjunct to a standard sedative strategy in TBI patients.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of early coma arousal therapy on conscious level and cognitive function in sever traumatic brain injury patients. BACKGROUND: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) could be simply defined as an alteration in brain function due to external forces and is considered as one of the leading cause of death and disability worldwide, especially among young adults and the elderly. Current estimates imply that annual incidence of TBI is 50-60 million worldwide, and specifically for Europe and USA, 0.5% of Europeans and 1.1% of Americans are experiencing a TBI each year. The original scale has since been revised and is known as the Rancho Los Amigos Revised Scale (RLAS-R). One of the limitations of the original eight level scale was that it did not accurately reflect the individuals with higher levels of recovery. Two more levels were added to the initial eight level Ranchos Scale to create a more comprehensive ten level scale named the Rancho Los Amigos Revised Scale (RLAS-R).