Publications by authors named "Cathra Halabi"

Outpatient care following nonhospitalized traumatic brain injury (TBI) is variable, and often sparse. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's 2022 report on highlighted the need to improve the consistency and quality of TBI care in the community. In response, the present study aimed to identify existing evidence-based guidance and specific clinical actions over the days to months following nonhospitalized TBI that should be prioritized for implementation in primary care.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Fatigue is a major "invisible" symptom in people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS), which may affect speech. Automated speech analysis is an objective, rapid tool to capture digital speech biomarkers linked to functional outcomes.

Objective: To use automated speech analysis to assess multiple sclerosis (MS) fatigue metrics.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with chronic medical conditions. Evidence from diverse clinical administrative datasets may improve care delivery.

Objective: To characterize post-TBI risk of incident neuropsychiatric and medical conditions in a California health care system administrative database and validate findings from a Massachusetts dataset.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: An estimated 14-23% of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) incur multiple lifetime TBIs. The relationship between prior TBI and outcomes in patients with moderate to severe TBI (msTBI) is not well delineated. We examined the associations between prior TBI, in-hospital mortality, and outcomes up to 12 months after injury in a prospective US msTBI cohort.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Objectives: Hospital length of stay (HLOS) is a metric of injury severity, resource utilization, and healthcare access. Recent evidence has shown an association between Medicaid insurance and increased HLOS after traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study aims to validate the association between Medicaid and prolonged HLOS after TBI using the National Trauma Data Bank.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Concussions are common in sports. Return-to-play protocols can be enhanced by objective biometrics.

Objective: To characterize temporal changes of headpulse, a digital biometric, in athletes with sports-related concussion; to explore the association of unstructured physical activity with headpulse changes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The management of unruptured intracranial aneurysms remains controversial. The decisions to treat are heavily informed by estimated risk of bleeding. However, these estimates are imprecise, and better methods for stratifying the risk or tailoring treatment strategy are badly needed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This article focuses on the inpatient evaluation and management of ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack (TIA). We describe foundational principles including quality metrics, TIA, and stroke as emergencies, TIA/minor stroke management, and standard assessments before discussing tailored evaluation and management strategies by stroke type.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Evidence is growing to support minimally invasive surgical evacuation of intraparenchymal hematomas, particularly those with minimal residual hematoma volumes following evacuation. To maximize the potential for neurologic recovery, it is imperative that the trajectory for access to the hematoma minimizes disruption of normal parenchyma. Flat panel detector CT-based navigation and needle guidance software provides a platform that uses flat panel detector CT imaging obtained on the angiography table to aid reliable and safe access to the hematoma.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Heterogenous central nervous system (CNS) neurologic manifestations of polyarteritis nodosa (PAN) are underrecognized. We review three cases of patients with PAN that illustrate a range of nervous system pathology, including the classical mononeuritis multiplex as well as uncommon brain and spinal cord vascular manifestations.

Case Presentation: Case 1 presented with mononeuritis multiplex and characteristic skin findings.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Psoriasis is the most common chronic inflammatory condition involving the T helper cell system. Population studies have demonstrated that patients with psoriasis and/or psoriatic arthritis have an increased risk of developing vascular risk factors, including diabetes, hypertension, and obesity, and increased risk of adverse vascular events, including myocardial infarction and stroke. Population studies have generally investigated the individual contributions of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis to development of vascular risk factors; fewer studies have investigated the additive contribution of comorbid inflammatory disorders.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

After severe neurocognitive decline developed in an otherwise healthy 63-year-old man, brain magnetic resonance imaging showed eosinophilic meningoencephalitis and enhancing lesions. The patient tested positive for antibodies to Baylisascaris spp. roundworms, was treated with albendazole and dexamethasone, and showed improvement after 3 months.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Temporal lobectomy can lead to favorable seizure outcomes in medically-refractory temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Although most studies focus on seizure freedom after temporal lobectomy, less is known about seizure semiology in patients who "fail" surgery. Morbidity differs between seizure types that impair or spare consciousness.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and semantic dementia have been associated with striatal degeneration, but few studies have delineated striatal subregion volumes in vivo or related them to the clinical phenotype. We traced caudate, putamen, and nucleus accumbens on magnetic resonance images to quantify volumes of these structures in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, semantic dementia, Alzheimer disease, and healthy controls (n=12 per group). We further related these striatal volumes to clinical deficits and neuropathologic findings in a subset of patients.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study compared rates of regional atrophy in Alzheimer disease (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and semantic dementia (SD). Cross-sectional studies have shown that different dementia syndromes are associated with different patterns of regional brain tissue loss. Rates of atrophy over time may be useful for differential diagnosis, and could be used to monitor disease progression, serving as an outcome measure for clinical trials.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Despite the predominant frontal neuropathology of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), traditional measures of executive functioning do not reliably distinguish FTD from Alzheimer's disease (AD). Performance monitoring is an executive function that is associated with frontal lobe integrity and may be disrupted in FTD. The current study adopted a component process approach to evaluate the discriminant validity and neuroanatomical correlates of performance monitoring (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between lobar volumes and set shifting. We studied 101 subjects, including 36 normal controls, 16 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease, 30 patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and 19 patients with semantic dementia (SD), using a shifting paradigm that carefully controlled for component abilities. Subjects were administered two conditions of the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS) Design Fluency Test.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF