Active clinical trials for "Brain Injuries"

The purpose of this study is to evaluate a multi-disciplinary, multi-setting intervention with the goal of improving outcomes for children who have experienced a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). The project aims to improve and support mTBI diagnosis and management, and improve critical decision making by clinicians during their interaction with the injured child, their family, and their school.

The most persistent and disabling postconcussive symptoms following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) are sleep disturbances and cognitive dysfunction, with few tractable interventions currently available. Here, a novel therapy will be tested consisting of dietary supplementation with branched chain amino acids (BCAA), based on the study team's previous preclinical work showing restoration of glutamate neurotransmitter balance in sleep and memory circuits. Supplementation with Amino acid Rehabilitative Therapy in TBI (SmART-TBI) is a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded, exploratory clinical trial of BCAA intended to establish the feasibility, acceptability, and limited efficacy of long-term BCAA to improve sleep and cognition in Veterans with mTBI. These results will inform the optimal study design of a future, full-scale randomized controlled trial, including the identification of the proper dose and duration of BCAA to improve sleep and the potential subpopulations of Veterans with mTBI that may benefit the most.

In severe brain-injured patients, it is recommended to strictly control the fever in order to limit brain damage (objective of neuroprotection) via the targeted temperature management (TTM). In the guidelines, the target temperature is the systemic temperature, just for practical reasons (brain temperature not being monitored in most polyvalent ICU). However, in NICU, the brain temperature is monitored routinely via the Intra-Cerebral Pressure (ICP) sensor. Since in the febrile brain-injured patients the objective of the TTM is neuroprotection, it would be more appropriate to target temperature control over the cerebral temperature. The objective of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of TTM directly coupled to the brain temperature. Adult patients with brain injury requiring ICP monitoring (Pressio 2, Sophysa France) and fever requiring TTM (cerebral greater than or equal to 38.5 °C) will be enrolled. The TTM will be carried out according to the usual methods of the investigator's service: external cooling devices coupled with cerebral temperature (Artic Sun, Bard France), including two phases: the cooling phase (H0 to H3) and the maintenance phase (from H3 to the end of the cooling). Two groups will be formed. In the interventional group, coupling of the TTM will be carried out to the cerebral temperature. In the control group, coupling of the TTM will be carried out to the systemic temperature measured at the bladder site. The primary outcome will be the percentage of time during which the cerebral temperature will be measured within recommended target temperature range (i.e. 36 to 37 °C) during the maintenance phase (H3 to H12): comparison of averages. Cerebral hemodynamic parameters (ICP, transcranial doppler, and brain tissue oxygen partial pressure if available) will also be collected, in order to be correlated with the delta temperature (cerebral temperature minor systemic temperature). No medical device will be put in place specifically for the need of the study.

Traumatic Brain Injury is a major health concern in United States. There is a un-met need to develop new therapeutic options for faster neuron recovery without causing significant side effects. The role of ketones in neuronal recovery has been studied and has been found to be useful in decreasing size of contusion. The present study aims to study the safety and feasibility profile of ketogenic diet.

Individuals will be recruited from the VA Portland Health Care System and the community affiliated with Oregon Health & Science University. Traumatic brain injury status will be assessed as a contributing factor. Subjects will be randomized to one of 3 groups (BCAA or one of 2 placebo conditions) and instructed to consume study product twice daily for 21 days. Self-report questionnaires, wrist actigraphy, pressure pain testing, and cognitive function will be assessed pre and post the experimental period.

With an average of 21,000 diagnosed brain injuries each year among military personnel, traumatic brain injury (TBI) remains a major health concern for the United States Military Health System. Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is the most common type of brain injury sustained by military personnel and may result in chronic cognitive impairment.Unfortunately, many service members (SMs) have a history of multiple head injuries as well as psychological co-morbidities that negatively influence recovery. Advances in treatment options for cognitive rehabilitation following mTBI have been of increasing interest to the medical community and may increase treatment efficacy for injured SMs to ensure force readiness. Cognitive Rehabilitation (CR) for severe brain injury focuses on compensatory strategies for activities of daily living such as using lists to remember grocery items or reminders to take medications and attend medical appointments. Research has shown CR interventions to have considerable effectiveness in the acute and sub-acute phase of recovery after severe TBI. But there is insufficient evidence that they improve rates of individuals returning to work, independence in activities of daily living (ADL), community re-integration, or quality of life.

In this proposal, the investigators extend their previous SPiRE feasibility and preliminary effectiveness study to examine STEP-Home efficacy in a RCT design. This novel therapy will target the specific needs of a broad range of underserved post-9/11 Veterans. It is designed to foster reintegration by facilitating meaningful improvement in the functional skills most central to community participation: emotional regulation (ER), problem solving (PS), and attention functioning (AT). The skills trained in the STEP-Home workshop are novel in their collective use and have not been systematically applied to a Veteran population prior to the investigators' SPiRE study. STEP-Home will equip Veterans with skills to improve daily function, reduce anger and irritability, and assist reintegration to civilian life through return to work, family, and community, while simultaneously providing psychoeducation to promote future engagement in VA care. The innovative nature of the STEP-Home intervention is founded in the fact that it is: (a) an adaptation of an established and efficacious intervention, now applied to post-9/11 Veterans; (b) nonstigmatizing (not "therapy" but a "skills workshop" to boost acceptance, adherence and retention); (c) transdiagnostic (open to all post-9/11 Veterans with self-reported reintegration difficulties; Veterans often have multiple mental health diagnoses, but it is not required for enrollment); (d) integrative (focus on the whole person rather than specific and often stigmatizing mental and physical health conditions); (e) comprised of Veteran-specific content to teach participants cognitive behavioral skills needed for successful reintegration (which led to greater acceptability in feasibility study); (f) targets anger and irritability, particularly during interactions with civilians; (g) emphasizes psychoeducation (including other available treatment options for common mental health conditions); and (h) challenges beliefs/barriers to mental health care to increase openness to future treatment and greater mental health treatment utilization. Many Veterans who participated in the development phases of this workshop have gone on to trauma or other focused therapies, or taken on vocational (work/school/volunteer) roles after STEP-Home. The investigators have demonstrated that the STEP-Home workshop is feasible and results in pre-post change in core skill acquisition that the investigators demonstrated to be directly associated with post-workshop improvement in reintegration status in their SPiRE study. Given the many comorbidities of this cohort, the innovative treatment addresses multiple aspects of mental health, cognitive, and emotional function simultaneously and bolsters reintegration in a short-term group to maximize cost-effectiveness while maintaining quality of care.

This will be a multistate, multicenter clinical study to determine the efficacy and safety of medical cannabis for a wide variety of chronic medical conditions.

Neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is a major cause of death or long-term disability in infants born at term in the western world, affecting about 1-4 per 1.000 life births and consequently about 5-20.000 infants per year in Europe. Hypothermic treatment became the only established therapy to improve outcome after perinatal hypoxic-ischemic insults. Despite hypothermia and neonatal intensive care, 45-50% of affected children die or suffer from long-term neurodevelopmental impairment. Additional neuroprotective interventions, beside hypothermia, are warranted to further improve their outcome. Allopurinol is a xanthine oxidase inhibitor and reduces the production of oxygen radicals and brain damage in experimental, animal, and early human studies of ischemia and reperfusion. This project aims to evaluate the efficacy and safety of allopurinol administered immediately after birth to near-term infants with HIE in addition to hypothermic treatment.

The purpose of this study is to test the efficacy of a walking and balance training program designed to safely challenge and improve walking performance and balance in relation to walking speed, strength, endurance, and balance after traumatic brain injury (TBI). The aim and primary hypothesis of this research project is: Aim) Test and implement a new personalized intervention strategy, in addition to usual and customary care at an inpatient rehabilitation clinic, to improve patient outcomes with secondary conditions associated with impaired balance and walking that typically occur post brain injury. After validation of the locomotor Battery of tests, we will implement a personalized training strategy for individuals based on their battery profile. Hypothesis) Individuals training with this individualized protocol will demonstrate improved walking and balance outcomes and those with lesser pre-intervention impairment will improve at a greater rate than those with greater pre-intervention impairment.