Dietlose

The Children & Adolescents Committee of the Brain Injury Association of New Jersey presents a free educational session intended for parents and school professionals. Participants will learn the basics of why children and adolescents with brain injury experience behavioral issues, what those behaviors look like, and how they are a way to communicate feelings and frustrations. Parents and school professionals will also learn how to prevent and manage behavioral issues, both at home and in the classroom.

The seminars will be held:

Thursday March 13, 2008
7:00-9:00 PM
Children's Specialized Hospital, Mountainside

and,

Tuesday March 25, 2008
6:30-8:30 PM
Weisman children's Rehabilitation Hospital, Marlton

For more information or to RSVP, contact Erica Puopolo at 732.738.1002 or epuopolo@bianj.org.

I am pleased to announce that, at the recent Brain Injury Association of America Leadership meeting, the Brain Injury Association of New Jersey received the Award of Excellence for Communications for organizations with a budget above $250,000.

The honor was based on the submission of Returning to Work After Brain injury:  An Information and Resource Guide for New Jersey's One-Stop Centers, written by BIANJ  staff members Judi Weinberger, Rita Stindlberger, and former employee Samantha Caetano. 

I am proud that the fine work of these staff members has been recognized.  In addition, this publication has been valuable to workforce development personnel in New Jersey and has been adapted for use by other states in the ongoing efforts to achieve successful employment outcomes for persons with brain injury.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare published a new report stating that men are two thirds more likely to suffer from a traumatic brain injury than women. The report shows that one in every 45 people suffer from an acquired brain injury, and more than two thirds of those suffering are men.

The report also states that men are more than twice as likely to be hospitalized from their injury as women, and men in the 25-34 age group were more than three times as likely to be hospitalized than women.

You can read more on the Australian Institute of Health & Welfare's report here.

Last month, I discussed a number of studies regarding the Word Memory Test (WMT) and testing efforts in traumatic brain injury patients.  As you will recall, the WMT was developed by Dr. Paul Green who has asserted that this test, which he developed, has consistently been found to be close to or actually 100% accurate in classifying simulators versus good effort volunteers.
 
According to Dr. Green’s most recent study, the Word Memory Test (WMT) is “meant to be virtually insensitive to all but the most extreme forms of impairment of learning and memory.”  The rationale of this and other symptom validity measures is that the tests are so easy that even patients with brain damage should be able to pass the test, scoring above the accepted cut-off point for failure and poor effort.  Dr. Green and others assert that the WMT and other SMTs place “only minimal cognitive demands on subjects, because of their simplicity thereby explaining why even patients with severe brain injury are able to pass these measures.”
 
Recently, Allen, Bigler et al at Bingham Young University have called into question the validity of the WMT’s foundation.  The researchers scanned four males age 22 - 26 with fMRI who received no compensation.  The males first were given the computerized version of Green’s WMT,  Participants underwent fMRI scanning during the delayed recognition phase.  The participants were also scanned while performing a control block which was chosen because it “matches the motor activity of the test task and because it clearly required minimal cognitive effort compared with the DR task.”
 
The researchers hypothesized that if the WMT “were to place only minimal cognitive demands on subjects because of its simplicity, little fMRI activation should be observed except in areas directly involved in the sensory processing of the task.  However, the fMRI data rejected this hypothesis as it showed that the WMT significantly taxed cognitive symptoms known to be involved in mental effort, where activation was found in areas consistently associated with increases in task difficulty, memory lobe and other forms of cognitive effort.  The researchers concluded that their findings “constituted compelling evidence against the notion that the WMT is an effortless cognitive test.”
 
The authors stated:
 
 Given that the greatest likelihood for damage in TBI, including mild TBI, occurs with frontotemporal and limbic regions, these are the very regions involved in cognitive effort shown in the fMRI study....
 
 This study raises serious questions about whether one can make straightforward inferences about cognitive effort from SVT performance alone.  Future structural and functional neuroimaging research is needed to better understand what the true meaning is of poor effort especially in TBI and other patient populations with distinct SNC lesions.

The Brain Injury Community mourns the passing of Charles Walter Haynes, Brain Injury Association of America Board Chairman and long-time advocate of the brain injury community.

Charles Haynes started his life as an advocate for persons with brain injury and their families after his daughter, Bonnie, was injured in a car accident in 1979. Mr. Haynes established the Texas Head Injury Foundation and served as its first president.  Later he elected as chairman of the board of the Brain Injury Association of America (then known as the National Head Injury Foundation).

Mr. Haynes is a great loss to the brain injury community. You can read more on Mr. Haynes' life of service here.