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Transcript: Episode #11

“New Frontiers in Traumatic Brain Injury: Evaluations and Treatment” Will Be Topic of
NIH Clinical Center’s “Medicine for the Public” Series, Dec. 16.

EPISODE #11
Uploaded:  December 4, 2008
Running Time:  5:14


SCHMALFELDT: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this is CLINICAL CENTER RADIO.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than five million Americans will need life-long help to perform daily activities because of traumatic brain injury.  It’s a condition we’ve heard a lot about over the past few years, as Defense Department experts report that the rate of combat-related brain injuries among service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan appears to be higher than in previous conflicts.

Traumatic brain injury, also known as TBI, will be the topic of the “Medicine for the Public” presentation, Tuesday December 16, 7 pm at the Lipsett Ampitheater in the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.  Dr. Leighton Chan, Chief of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the NIH Clinical Center, will present the topic, which will focus on new frontiers in evaluation and treatment.

CHAN: I think that, what everybody wants to know, is do we have a magic bullet.  And I wish the answer to that was "yes."  But unfortunately, the answer is really "not yet."  There have been probably 50 clinical trials using 20 separate medications to look for that magic bullet.  And all of them have been negative.  What we do know is that good rehabilitation helps folks.  It helps them get better and it helps them more than if they got nothing. But is it a magic bullet to return them completely to a normal life?  No.

SCHMALFELDT: Dr. Chan said that TBI can be difficult to diagnose in returning service members, as the symptoms of memory loss, confusion, fatigue, depression, pain and balance issues can be caused by other conditions.

CHAN: We're trying to sort out the degree to which those symptoms may be the result of a blast injury, or from post traumatic stress disorder, which is another problem that many soldiers encounter, because the symptoms are very much the same.  There's a lot of overlap.  How do we diagnose those individuals?  It's not easy.  And part of the research going on now is to help identify that.  When you obviously have a clear injury on some sort of imaging study, like an MRI -- and there are very sensitive MRIs done nowadays with much more powerful machines than even 10 years ago -- it's easier to see a dysfunction in the brain.  But having said that, very often you have signs and symptoms that are very clearly traumatic brain injury, but the MRI is normal.  The new research that's going on at NIH is to develop new imaging methods, more sensitive imaging methods that can help us identify a sort of mild traumatic brain injury -- for lack of a better term.

SCHMALFELDT: Dr. Chan will discuss the research being done at the NIH Clinical Center and elsewhere into finding new and better ways to diagnose and treat TBI.  This includes research into the effects of exercise on rehabilitation and a look at “neuroplasticity” – which refers to the brain’s ability to heal itself after an injury.  Dr. Chan said findings from stroke studies may hold some answers.  He will also discuss an upcoming $70 million collaboration between NIH and the military to create a neuroregeneration center to treat TBI.

He said folks who attend his presentation will come away with a better understanding of traumatic brain injuries and what the NIH is doing to improve diagnosis and treatment.

CHAN: Well, I think there are a couple of things they should know.  Number one, that NIH is working very hard on this issue and if they know of individuals who have brain injuries, that we will probably be looking at some clinical trials, and if people want to get involved in clinical trials and clinical research that we will have opportunities for that.  Number two is that the signs and symptoms of mild brain  injury can be very subtle.  And some people can go even months after a mild head injury feeling a little different and not really necessarily relating it to an injury that they had previously.  They should probably see a physician and get that diagnosed.

SCHMALFELDT: “Medicine for the Public” is a series of lectures on disease-related topics by NIH scientists, sponsored by the NIH Clinical Center.  The lectures are free and open to the public. Since 1977, the series has provided the public with the latest information on medical research.  For more information, including info on all four “Medicine for the Public” presentations, log on to  http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov. From America’s Clinical Research Hospital, this has been CLINICAL CENTER RADIO.  In Bethesda, Maryland, I’m Bill Schmalfeldt at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

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This page last reviewed on 12/4/08



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