(Press-News.org) NEW YORK, NY (April 26, 2021) -Brain research and advocacy nonprofit Cohen Veterans Bioscience (CVB) today announced the launch of a National TBI Precision Solutions Research Roadmap, with the advent of the first in a series of publications resulting from its Brain Trauma Blueprint framework program.
The Brain Trauma Blueprint is a framework that enables stakeholder groups across government, academia, foundations, and industry to advance precision diagnostics and treatments for brain trauma through a coordinated effort. The framework comprises a 12-step process to jointly identify unmet patient needs, associated research priorities, landscape state of the science, identify research gaps and barriers, and provide recommendations for progress. The framework also provides a call to action for funders and collaborators across the broader stakeholder community to engage in a transparent & coordinated network.
Advancing TBI Care Through a Research Roadmap
Authored by leading experts in the traumatic brain injury (TBI) field, the six-part series is being published in the Journal of Neurotrauma and will lay the framework for a roadmap to advance the field, based on a State-of-the-Science consensus conference held in 2019 with >125 leaders in the field. The first installment focuses on the complex nature of brain trauma and how variability in clinical presentation (phenotypes) has confounded research. The consensus roadmap recommended that a streamlined method for characterizing data collected in different settings could lead to more targeted care and improved patient outcomes.
As a direct outcome of the collaboration fostered through the Blueprint, CVB and its collaborators have developed the first of a suite of tools to capture the variability of subject-level data across the spectrum of TBI. Using this standardized approach, the new tool, PhenoBench, is made freely available via a public code repository to enable researchers to evaluate phenotyping data collected across different studies.
"TBI presents differently from one patient to the next, and so it is important to have the ability to predict who might recover versus who is susceptible to long-term effects. This set of tools is anticipated to provide researchers with the means to standardize how they analyze and subsequently interpret TBI phenotyping data across different patient populations," said Lee Lancashire, PhD, CVB Chief Information Officer, and collaborating author on the publication. "We expect PhenoBench to have a significant impact on the field by ensuring that new and existing data can be used to discover reproducible and transparent signatures of patient phenotypes. This will enable prediction of TBI outcomes and move us closer to tailored treatments that improve recovery."
Toward a Personalized Approach to TBI Care
TBI is a leading cause of death and disability in the U. S. Yet despite the personal, economic, and societal costs of TBI, as well as the significant research investments to date, there are no FDA-approved treatments that address the long-term consequences many individuals who have sustained a TBI will go on to develop. Although most individuals who experience a TBI recover, a significant subset have persistent symptoms, including mental health conditions, sleep disturbances, and memory impairment, further increasing the personal and economic burden. Many researchers believe that studying the clinical features--or phenotype--of patients who recover from a TBI versus those who develop chronic effects could lead to better, more personalized treatment options for all TBI patients.
To understand the challenges of a phenotype-based strategy for TBI care, the authors of the Journal of Neurotrauma's first Brain Trauma Blueprint publication--Phenotyping the Spectrum of Traumatic Brain Injury: A Review and Pathway to Standardization [10.1089/neu.2021.0059]--describe the current research on approaches to patient phenotyping, and the need to consider new approaches such as unsupervised machine-learning, a type of artificial intelligence that looks for patterns and similarities across vast amounts of data without needing to know the clinical outcomes.
According to Mary Jo Pugh, PhD, RN, professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Epidemiology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and Investigator at the Informatics, Decision-Enhancement and Analytic Science Center of Innovation at the VA Salt Lake City and lead author on the manuscript, "Phenotyping is becoming an increasingly popular approach to the evaluation of TBI and trajectories of TBI-related outcomes. It has great potential to identify the right patient for the right treatment at the right time."
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Additional authors on the publication include Eamonn Kennedy, PhD (Univ of Utah, developer of PhenoBench), Eric M Prager, PhD (Cohen Veterans Bioscience), Jeffrey Humpherys, PhD (Univ of Utah), Kristen Dams-O'Connor, PhD (Mount Sinai), Dallas Hack, MD (ret. Col. Army), Mary Katherine McCafferty (Univ of Utah) Jessica Wolfe, PhD, MPH (Cohen Veterans Bioscience), Kristine C. Yaffe, MD (UCSF), Michael McCrea, PhD (Medical College of Wisconsin), Adam R. Ferguson, PhD (UCSF), Lee Lancashire, PhD (Cohen Veterans Bioscience), Jamshid Ghajar, MD, PhD (Stanford), Angela Lumba-Brown, MD (Stanford).
Other publications in the series will cover key domains identified as barriers to progress: epidemiology, basic research, biomarker discovery and validation, clinical trial design, and clinical guideline implementation. Altogether, the TBI Precisions Solutions Roadmap will guide the development of actionable research priorities that frame the next phase of the roadmap over the coming months.
About Cohen Veterans Bioscience
Cohen Veterans Bioscience is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) biomedical research and technology organization dedicated to fast-tracking the development of diagnostics and tailored therapeutics to advance brain health.
About the Brain Trauma Blueprint
The Brain Trauma Blueprint is a framework to advance precision diagnostics and therapeutics for brain trauma through a process of community stakeholder consensus roadmapping and collaborative execution. More information can be found at http://www.braintraumablueprint.org
SPOKANE, Wash. - Touching patients while providing care is an important and unavoidable aspect of the nursing profession. Nurses can also transform touch into a useful therapeutic tool to improve patients'-- and their own--wellbeing.
That is the topic of a study, "'Permission to Touch': Nurses' Perspectives of Interpersonal Contact during Patient Care," published in the Western Journal of Nursing Research.The authors include two Washington State University College of Nursing faculty, Associate Professor Marian Wilson and Assistant Professor Tullamora Landis, former faculty member Michele Shaw, and lead author Enrico DeLuca, of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, who visited WSU in 2018 to work with Wilson on the study.
Nurses touch patients frequently ...
Creating the best conditions for cells to make energy and survive critical illness is a challenge little understood in modern medicine. Now a new study led by scientists at the University of Plymouth, in collaboration with University College London and the Universities of Cambridge and Southampton, shows early signs that cells in some critically ill patients actually adapt to their conditions by producing energy more efficiently.
The research, published in the journal Redox Biology, took muscle and blood samples over seven days from 21 critically ill patients (ie those with two or more organs failing) in intensive care, and 12 healthy people, comparing cells' behaviour.
The study showed that all of the critically ill ...
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Few sites in the world preserve a continuous archaeological record spanning millions of years. Wonderwerk Cave, located in South Africa's Kalahari Desert, is one of those rare sites. Meaning "miracle" in Afrikaans, Wonderwerk Cave has been identified as potentially the earliest cave occupation in the world and the site of some of the earliest indications of fire use and tool making among prehistoric humans.
New research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, led by a team of geologists and archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ...
Summer is the ozone season: The harmful gas forms at ground level on hot, sunny days. In recent years, however, the rise in ozone levels over the summer months has not been as pronounced in Germany as it was previously. According to a new study, this is primarily due to a reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions. This trend can be observed across Germany's southwestern regions in particular, while Berlin lags behind.
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Australian researchers have identified neutralising nanobodies that block the SARS-CoV-2 virus from entering cells in preclinical models.
The discovery paves the way for further investigations into nanobody-based treatments for COVID-19.
Published in PNAS, the research is part of a consortium-led effort, bringing together the expertise of Australian academic leaders in infectious diseases and antibody therapeutics at WEHI, the Doherty Institute and the Kirby Institute.
At a glance
Researchers have identified nanobodies that effectively blocked the SARS-CoV-2 virus from entering cells in pre-clinical models of COVID-19 infection.
Nanobodies - which are tiny immune proteins - could provide an alternative to ...
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"The statement provides data on the risks of each type of hormonal therapy so clinicians can use it as a guide to help manage cardiovascular risks during cancer treatment," said Tochi M. Okwuosa, D.O., FAHA, chair of the scientific statement writing group, an associate professor of ...
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"The findings will inform early childhood obesity prevention intervention ...
A recent study provides insights on the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on employment, anxiety, and financial distress among women who have gynecologic cancer and low income. The findings are published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.
For the study, Y. Stefanie Chen, MD, of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, and her colleagues conducted telephone interviews with 100 women with gynecologic cancer living in New York City who were covered by Medicaid health insurance.
Among the major findings:
31 percent of patients reported being employed prior to the pandemic, and 21 percent had a change in employment status due to the pandemic.
50 percent ...
