PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Researchers at Villanova University have received a five-year, $3.3 million grant to look into rehabilitation for those suffering from traumatic brain injuries.
Drs. Helene Moriarity and Laraine Winter have been exploring the best way to rehabilitate those with traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, for more than a decade. They reported 1.5 million civilians suffer a TBI every year. The grant from the National Institute for Nursing Research at the National Institutes of Health, will allow them to look at patients and their families or caregivers.
Winter says the research does not look at the initial injury, but at how the patient manages a couple years later, in the "post-acute" stage.
"We're no longer interested in focusing on the patient's brain, we're interested in improving the patient's life and well being and functioning by changing everything in the person's environment," she said.
According to Moriarity, earlier research showed how big a role family played in improving the quality of life for the patient, and for the caregivers.
"Family members in our program, they had reduced depressive symptoms and reduced caregiver burden," she explained, "and those are very important outcomes because they are the most commonly reported psychosocial outcomes."
The study is called "A Randomized Controlled Trial of an Innovative In-home Rehabilitation Program for Persons with TBI and Their Families: Home-based Occupational-therapy and Management of the Environment (HOME for Us)," and will bring occupational therapists into the home to work with the patient and family, on whatever they decide is the biggest problem. While their original research studied only veterans, this study will focus on civilians.
Winter detailed which injuries would be included.
"Children get brain injuries primarily by vehicular crashes or falls," she explained. "Then in adults in midlife, it's vehicular, and in the elderly, it's falls."
Moriarity says the patients and family will identify the biggest problem and an occupational therapist will help them devise strategies to deal with it. For instance, losing car keys.
"With someone with TBI, they could have a huge reaction, explode because they lost their keys. So then you have this intense anger and frustration and then you have this affecting the entire family," she said.
220 families in the Philadelphia area will take part in the study. The researchers are hoping to begin their work in the spring.