Recovery from pediatric brain injury a lifelong process, experts say

Recent research discussed in a special issue of NeuroRehabilitation

2012-07-10

(Press-News.org) Amsterdam, NL, July 8, 2012 – In the last ten years, a new understanding of pediatric brain injury and recovery has emerged. Professionals now understand that recovery may be a lifelong process for the child's entire circle of family, friends, and healthcare providers. The latest efforts to advance medical and rehabilitative services to move children from medical care and rehabilitation to community reintegration are discussed by the leading experts in a recently published special issue of NeuroRehabilitation.

"Recovery extends well beyond the technical period of rehabilitation," say guest editors and noted authorities Peter D. Patrick, PhD, MS, Associate Professor Emeritus of the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, and Ronald C. Savage, EdD, Chairman, North American Brain Injury Society and International Pediatric Brain Injury Society. "Children, adolescents, and families struggle to regain the momentum of their life so as to reduce problems, increase opportunity, and support increased participation in work, play, home, and relationships."

Neural plasticity introduces unknown challenges in the care of the recovering brain, and the issue addresses the most challenging and demanding medical conditions that children may confront following severe brain injury. However, children do most of their recovery at home, in school, and in the community, beyond medical surveillance. "Family-centered" approaches to developing interventions are emerging. For example, Dr. Damith T. Woods and colleagues report on a novel telephone support program to help parents manage challenging behavior associated with brain injury.

Children and adolescents with brain injuries have difficulty adjusting to their injuries and altered abilities, and frequently suffer from low self-esteem and loss of confidence. A study by Carol A. Hawley finds that children with traumatic brain injury have significantly lower self-esteem than normal children, and recommends that rehabilitation strategies promote a sense of self-worth.

Re-entry into school is a major milestone of recovery and the issue highlights a number of efforts to help children improve and return to a positive developmental trajectory. An article by Beth Wicks describes an innovative program in Britain that looks at "education as rehabilitation," translating successful adult vocational programs into educational rehabilitation programs for children. Lucia Willadino Braga and colleagues report on a program based on cooperative learning that helped preadolescents with acquired brain injury develop metacognitive strategies and improve self-concept, thereby helping empower the preadolescents in their social relationships.

"Over the years and in multiple places around the world, innovative and creative efforts have slowly revealed effective interventions for recovery," comment Dr. Patrick and Dr. Savage. "Increasingly the interventions are evidence-based. This issue is a contribution to the effort to improve outcomes for children and families."

### END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Belching black hole proves a biggie

2012-07-10

Observations with CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array have confirmed that astronomers have found the first known "middleweight" black hole. Outbursts of super-hot gas observed with a CSIRO radio telescope have clinched the identity of the first known "middleweight" black hole, Science Express reports online today. Called HLX-1 ("hyper-luminous X-ray source 1"), the black hole lies in a galaxy called ESO 243-49, about 300 million light-years away. Before it was found, astronomers had good evidence for only supermassive black holes — ones a million to a billion ...

Study reveals good news about the GI of rice

2012-07-10

Research analysing 235 types of rice from around the world has found its glycemic index (GI) varies from one type of rice to another with most varieties scoring a low to medium GI. This finding is good news because it not only means rice can be part of a healthy diet for the average consumer, it also means people with diabetes, or at risk of diabetes, can select the right rice to help maintain a healthy, low GI diet. The study found that the GI of rice ranges from a low of 48 to a high of 92, with an average of 64, and that the GI of rice depends on the type of rice ...

July/August 2012 Annals of Family Medicine tip sheet

2012-07-10

Opioid Use and Misuse for Chronic Pain: What is the Appropriate Role of Prescription Painkillers? A cluster of articles in the July/August issue of Annals looks at opioid use for the management of chronic pain, including the escalating levels of misuse, overdose and addiction associated with opioid pain relievers. The role of opioids in the management of chronic pain is timely and consequential — the volume of prescribed opioids has increased 600 percent from 1997 to 2007, and during roughly the same period, the number of unintentional lethal overdoses involving prescription ...

Annals of Internal Medicine tip sheet for July 10, 2012, online issue

2012-07-10

1. Free Curriculum Aims to Educate Internal Medicine Residents About Wasteful Health Care Spending Developed by the American College of Physicians and the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine, the New Curriculum is Part of ACP's Ongoing High-Value, Cost-Conscious Care Initiative Economists warn that health care spending in the United States is rising at an unsustainable rate. To slow the rate of increase, while preserving high quality care, thought leaders in academic medicine suggest that clinicians focus on using medical interventions that provide good value. This ...

JCI early table of contents for July 9, 2012

2012-07-10

Breathing easy: keeping airways open Asthma is an increasingly common chronic disorder characterized by wheezing and shortness of breath. Symptoms are caused by excessive airway smooth muscle contraction; however mechanisms serving to keep airways open are not fully understood. Dean Sheppard and colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco have revealed a pathway required for preventing exaggerated airway smooth muscle contraction. Their work investigates a protein called α9β1, which is highly expressed in airway smooth muscle, and makes use ...

Decreasing cancer risk associated with inflammatory bowel disease

2012-07-10

Inflammatory bowel disease is caused by chronic inflammation , which leads to damage of the intestinal epithelium. Patients with inflammatory bowel disease have an elevated risk for developing colorectal cancer because of this chronic inflammation. In an effort to develop strategies to break the cycle of inflammation, Dr. Brent Polk and colleagues at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles examined two mouse models of colorectal cancer. Their work shows that inactivating a key receptor, known as epidermal growth factor receptor, increases the frequency and ...

New silk technology preserves heat-sensitive drugs for months without refrigeration

2012-07-10

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (July 9, 2012, 3 PM EST) Researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering have discovered a way to maintain the potency of vaccines and other drugs -- that otherwise require refrigeration -- for months and possibly years at temperatures above 110 degrees F, by stabilizing them in a silk protein made from silkworm cocoons. Importantly, the pharmaceutical-infused silk can be made in a variety of forms such as microneedles, microvesicles and films that allow the non-refrigerated drugs to be stored and administered in a single device. The ...

Marcellus brine migration likely natural, not man-made

2012-07-10

A Duke University study of well water in northeastern Pennsylvania suggests that naturally occurring pathways could have allowed salts and gases from the Marcellus shale formation deep underground to migrate up into shallow drinking water aquifers. The study found elevated levels of salinity with similar geochemistry to deep Marcellus brine in drinking water samples from three groundwater aquifers, but no direct links between the salinity and shale gas exploration in the region. "This is a good news-bad news kind of finding," said Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry ...

Generic drugs key to US overseas HIV relief

2012-07-10

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPfAR) began in 2003 with good intentions, but it was not until the U.S. government's massive overseas public health campaign adopted generic drugs that it became a success, according to a new article by Brown University researchers in the July issue of the journal Health Affairs. Nearly a decade later, expanding the availability of generics remains urgent, especially as doctors in the field encounter resistance to first-line treatment regimens. "By 2002 generic drugs had been shown ...

Uncircumcised boys at higher risk of urinary tract infections

2012-07-10

Uncircumcised boys are at higher risk of urinary tract infection, regardless of whether the urethra is visible, found a new study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Urinary tract infections are one of the most common serious bacterial infections in children and, if not treated, can cause an infection of the blood or scar the kidneys. To determine whether the risk for infection is higher in boys with a visible urethral meatus, researchers looked at a cross-section of 393 boys who visited an emergency department with symptoms of a possible urinary ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

SNU researchers develop world’s first technology to observe atomic structural changes of nanoparticles in 3D

SNU researchers develop a new synthesis technology of single crystal 2D semiconductors, “Hypotaxy,” to enhance the commercialization of next-generation 2D semiconductors