Publications by authors named "Ross Zafonte"
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.
Article Synopsis
- Researchers developed prediction models to estimate the risk of posttraumatic epilepsy (PTE) in individuals who experienced moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injuries (TBI) during a two-year recovery period.
- The study utilized data from over 6,000 participants in the TBI Model Systems National Database, performing analyses to create models that account for various factors influencing seizure risk post-injury.
- Key findings indicated that Model 3, which focused on predicting new or recurrent seizures in the second year, had the highest sensitivity (86.63%) and effectiveness, with factors like cranial surgeries and traumatic hemorrhages being significant risk predictors across all models.
Article Synopsis
- Memory impairments are a common issue after traumatic brain injury (TBI), and donepezil, a medication that helps with cognitive function, was evaluated for its effectiveness on these memory problems in a clinical trial called MEMRI-TBI-D.
- The study involved 75 participants with severe memory issues related to TBI, who were split into two groups: one receiving donepezil and the other a placebo over 10 weeks; results showed significant memory improvement in those taking donepezil.
- While donepezil was effective, it came with some side effects, notably diarrhea and nausea, and had a treatment-emergent adverse event rate of 46%, but overall, it demonstrated a favorable safety profile for treating memory impairments
Objective: The aim of this study was to assess whether a history of prior concussions, and especially multiple prior concussions, is associated with clinical recovery following a subsequent sport-related concussion among collegiate student athletes.
Design: A naturalistic observational cohort study.
Setting: Eleven National Collegiate Athletics Association Division III colleges.
: Diagnosing concussions is problematic, in part due to the invisible nature of concussion symptoms, in addition to personal and interpersonal factors that influence symptom reporting. As a result, observable signs of concussion can ensure concussions are identified and appropriately treated. Here, we define a potential novel sign, the spontaneous headshake after a kinematic event (SHAAKE) and evaluate its utility in the diagnosis of concussion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Youth sports coaches play a critical role in proper concussion recognition and management, reinforcing the need for coach concussion education. As of 2021, most states have statutory and policy measures mandating concussion education for coaches. In practice, these mandates have been enacted through state legislatures and their respective youth sport governing bodies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Career duration is often used as a metric of neurotrauma exposure in studies of elite athletes. However, as a proxy metric, career length may not accurately represent causal factors, and associations with health outcomes may be susceptible to selection effects. To date, relationships between professional American-style football (ASF) career length and postcareer health remain incompletely characterised.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To create a census-based composite neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation index (NSDI) from geocoded residential addresses and to quantify how NSDI aligns with individual-level socioeconomic factors among people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Setting: Community.
Participants: People enrolled in the TBI Model Systems National Database (TBIMS NDB).
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 PDFArticle Synopsis
- The study looked at how concussions in mice might lead to anxiety and other health problems, especially when they ate a high-salt diet.
- Mice that had concussions and then ate a high-salt diet showed increased anxiety compared to those who ate a normal diet.
- The research also found that the gut bacteria in these mice changed more with the high-salt diet than the brain injury itself, and some bacteria were linked to higher anxiety levels.
Objective: The long-term consequences of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on brain structure remain uncertain. Given evidence that a single significant brain injury event increases the risk of dementia, brain-age estimation could provide a novel and efficient indexing of the long-term consequences of TBI. Brain-age procedures use predictive modeling to calculate brain-age scores for an individual using structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Mid-life cardiovascular risk factors are associated with later cognitive decline. Whether repetitive head injury among professional athletes impacts cardiovascular risk is unknown. We investigated associations between concussion burden and postcareer hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes among former professional American-style football (ASF) players.
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- A study was conducted to determine the prevalence of pain diagnoses among inpatient rehabilitation patients, finding that a significant 70% had at least one pain diagnosis.
- The research analyzed demographic and clinical data across 17 different rehabilitation impairment groups, revealing that more than half of patients in each group experienced some form of pain, with limb/extremity and joint pain being the most common.
- The findings suggest a need for improved pain management strategies in inpatient rehabilitation settings, as pain may significantly impact rehabilitation outcomes.
Article Synopsis
- - This study compares self-reported cardiovascular conditions (like hypertension and stroke) among individuals with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) to a matched control group without TBI.
- - Researchers found that those with TBI were more likely to report high blood pressure and stroke, but less likely to report heart failure and heart attacks, particularly in individuals over 50 years old.
- - The results suggest that TBI survivors have varying rates of cardiovascular issues compared to uninjured adults, possibly influenced by factors such as age and survival bias post-injury.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is independently associated with hypertension and ischemic stroke. The goal of this study was to determine the interplay between TBI and incident hypertension in the occurrence of post-TBI stroke. This prospective study used a hospital-based registry to identify patients without pre-existing comorbidities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConsensus criteria for traumatic encephalopathy syndrome (TES) specify that at least one core clinical feature of cognitive impairment (CI; e.g., difficulties with memory, executive function) or neurobehavioral dysregulation (ND; e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrimary Objective: We evaluated whether photobiomodulation with red/near infrared light applied transcranially via light emitting diodes (LED) was associated with reduced symptoms and improved cognitive functioning in patients with chronic symptoms following mild traumatic brain injury.
Research Design: Participants (3 men, 6 women; 22-61 years-old) underwent a 6-week intervention involving 18 40-minute transcranial LED treatment sessions.
Methods And Procedures: Reliable change indices were calculated for 10 neuropsychological test scores and 3 self-report questionnaires of subjective cognition, post-concussion symptoms, and depression at baseline and following treatment.
Context: People living with spinal cord injury (SCI) are at high risk for bone fractures. Neural, hormonal and metabolic contributors to bone microarchitectural alterations are incompletely understood.
Objective: To determine the relationship of physical, metabolic and endocrine characteristics with bone microarchitecture, characterized using high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HRpQCT) in SCI.
Provider Perspectives of Facilitators and Barriers to Reaching and Utilizing Chronic Pain Healthcare for Persons With Traumatic Brain Injury: A Qualitative NIDILRR and VA TBI Model Systems Collaborative Project.
J Head Trauma Rehabil
January 2024
Objective: To identify facilitators and barriers to reaching and utilizing chronic pain treatments for persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) organized around an Access to Care framework, which includes dimensions of access to healthcare as a function of supply (ie, provider/system) and demand (ie, patient) factors for a specified patient population.
Setting: Community.
Participants: Clinicians (n = 63) with experience treating persons with TBI were interviewed between October 2020 and November 2021.
Provider Perceived Facilitators and Barriers to Identifying, Perceiving, and Seeking Healthcare for Chronic Pain After TBI: A Qualitative NIDILRR and VA TBI Model Systems Collaborative Project.
J Head Trauma Rehabil
January 2024
Objective: Identify determinants to chronic pain healthcare for persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) informed by an Access to Care Framework. Findings related to the Access Framework's core domains of identifying a need, perceptions of the need, and seeking healthcare are reported.
Setting: Community.