Browsing by Subject "Traumatic brain injury"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Auditory Working Memory in Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury
    (2009-12) Baumgarten, Krystle Shane
    Thirteen adult survivors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and 10 healthy controls completed three working memory (WM) tasks: an auditory verbal n-back task, a listening span task, and a digit span task. The n-back task required that participants manually respond to previously specified types of matches located within strings of letters. In the listening span task, participants listened to sets of sentences during which they made true/false judgments, while at the same time maintaining the final word from each sentence in their working memory. The digit span task involved the recall of increasingly longer strings of numbers in either forward or backward order. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used when there were both between- and within-group comparisons, whereas simple group comparisons were made in the absence of within-group variables. In all tasks, participants demonstrated lower working memory scores as the tasks increased in length or difficulty. Participants with TBI made more errors on the listening span task, but did not perform worse on the n-back or digit span tasks compared to controls. Strong correlations were obtained between the n-back task scores and digit span backward scores within the TBI group whereas a moderate correlation was determined between the listening span task and digit span backward. Strong correlations were also found between predicted verbal IQ scores, verbal fluency scores, and errors on the listening span task, suggesting that pre-injury vocabulary and post-injury word retrieval are related to this WM task, which involves language. The clinical significance of these results is discussed.
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    Development of an ontology for rehabilitation: traumatic brain injury
    (2013-09) Grove, Michael John
    Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) rehabilitation interventions are very heterogeneous due to injury characteristics and pathology, patient demographics, healthcare settings, caregiver variability, and individualized, multi-discipline treatment plans. Consequently, comparing and generalizing the effectiveness of interventions is limited largely due to non-interoperable domain data. Addressing domain data interoperability through standardization can help unpack the "black-box" of rehabilitation treatment research. This paper describes the development of a foundational non-surgical, non-pharmaceutical ontology for TBI rehabilitation to facilitate domain interoperability. A conceptualization of the clinical domain was developed through a triangulation of data sources in order to create context and to serve as the underlying source for an ontology. A set of classes with primitive ontological relations based on the conceptualization was assembled in the Protégé Ontology Editor. The ontology is designed to facilitate further granularity of classes, properties, and instances as a collaborative hub for domain engagement. It is proposed that the ontology will aid in identification of effective rehabilitation components through the facilitation of comparative effectiveness research (CER).
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    The effects of a mindfulness based intervention on impulsivity, symptoms of depression, anxiety, experiences and quality of life of persons suffering from substance use disorders and traumatic brain injury.
    (2012-08) Kristofersson, Gisli Kort
    Background: Studies have shown that of the 1.4 million Americans who experience a traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year, many have significant cognitive disabilities as a result of their injuries and up to half suffer from substance use disorders (SUDs). This often leads to significant issues such as increased rates of mental health problems and delay or lack of return to full employment. Aims: The purpose of this pilot study was to examine the effectiveness and impact of an adapted MBSR program on different psychosocial dimensions of persons suffering from a dual diagnosis of SUDs and TBI. Method: Anxiety, depression, quality of life, impulsivity and participants’ and staff persons’ experiences were explored using a mixed methods design to gain a comprehensive picture of the impact of the adapted eight week mindfulness intervention on the participants of the study. The qualitative evaluation focused on the impact that mindfulness meditation practice had on clients’ and staff persons experiences using an adapted grounded theory approach. Descriptive and analytical statistics were used to examine outcomes of quantitative measures Results: The general health perceptions scale of the SF-36 declined over the course of the study in a statistically significant manner. Changes in other measures were mostly in the predicted direction but were not statistically significant. The qualitative interviews revealed numerous perceived benefits reported by participants gleaned from their involvement in the intervention. These included subjective reports of positive effects of the intervention on mood, impulsivity, anxiety and personal relationships. Conclusions: The adapted mindfulness based intervention applied in this study is an inexpensive and safe method that appeared to fit the needs of the participants in this study well according to qualitative interviews. However, the exploratory nature of this study and the paucity of statistically significant results, indicates that future studies with a larger sample size are needed in this field.
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    The effects of brain injury and talker characteristics on speech processing in a single-talker interference task.
    (2011-08) Krause, Miriam Ottilie
    People who have experienced traumatic brain injury (TBI) often report increased difficulty processing speech than they experienced before their injuries; and this difficulty is not always accompanied by impaired performance on standardized tests of language, auditory processing, or other cognitive factors. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of research directly addressing this issue. Prior studies have mostly focused on measures of characteristics such as attention (e.g. Schmitter-Edgecombe & Nissley, 2000), dichotic listening (e.g. Meyers, Roberts, Bayless, Volkert, & Evitts, 2002), and masking release (e.g. Krause, Nelson, & Kennedy, 2009) in people with TBI. All of these factors may play their part in functional listening tasks, but separately they cannot capture the complex task of speech processing (e.g. Wilson 2003). The goal of this dissertation is to build on existing work to explore and compare the issue of speech processing after brain injury across several levels: sentence repetition with single-talker interference, using targets spoken by native- and non-native-accented speakers of English; standardized testing of cognition and auditory processing; and semi-structured interviews about participants’ subjective experiences with complex speech processing. This study comprised two experiments. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to demonstrate the effects of simulated peripheral hearing loss on performance on the sentence repetition task. Participants in Experiment 1 were 30 healthy young adults, 15 of whom completed the sentence repetition task with stimuli that were filtered with a 1400 Hz low-pass filter to simulate peripheral hearing loss. The other 15 participants completed the task with unfiltered stimuli. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to compare adults with and without TBI on the (unfiltered) sentence repetition task, and included 13 people in each participant group. Groups were matched for age, education, and estimated verbal IQ within each experiment. Dependent variables for the sentence repetition task were accuracy and subjective effort. Participants in Experiment 2 also completed a battery of standardized tests and a semi-structured interview about their subjective experiences with speech processing. Results of Experiment 1 showed that the filtered group was less accurate and reported greater effort than the unfiltered group, and the filtered group showed greater effects of speaker accent. Results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that the TBI group had poorer accuracy than controls, but not significantly higher effort. As predicted, the TBI group also reported more subjective difficulty with complex speech processing than healthy controls, but there was no direct correlation between interview reports and accuracy on the sentence repetition task. Comparisons between the TBI group of Experiment 2 and the filtered group of Experiment 1 suggest that, although the TBI group did show impaired performance on the speech processing task, their performance was not consistent with the peripheral auditory effects that were modeled in Experiment 1. This suggests that the speech processing difficulty experienced by people with TBI cannot be explained by bottom-up processing (e.g. energetic masking) alone. Further research is needed in order to better understand the nature of speech processing problems after TBI, the ultimate goal of which is to be able to develop therapies and strategies that will allow people with TBI to communicate successfully even in difficult circumstances.
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    Traumatic brain injury: treatments
    (2010-07-22) Franc, Daniel
    Traumatic brain injury is a common episode, and prompt diagnosis is important for optimal treatment. A number of acute and chronic treatments are available for improved prognosis.