SCI with Brain Injury: Bedside-to-Bench Modeling for Developing Treatment and Rehabilitation Strategies.

摘要

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is frequently accompanied by traumatic brain injury (TBI), but evidence-based approaches for treatment of this dual- diagnosis are lacking. This project proposed using current clinical-practice evidence to guide development of an animal model to provide a new tool for studying the biological mechanisms involved, and to open new directions for therapeutics for combined injury. During this second year, we have focused on building a clinical TBI+SCI patient database from the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and from the VAPAHCS, that details the acute and chronic stages of recovery after dual-injury. This required development of common data elements and methods for querying different types of patient records. We now have an overview of recovery and the medications given to the SCI+TBI patients, and have tracked the duration of all medications prescribed during admission for acute rehabilitation. More medications are used in the dual-diagnosis patients than for each injury alone. We have also built a database of SCI+TBI patients from records at SFGH providing information on acute ICU treatment of SCI+TBI patients. These clinical data are now being used to develop hypotheses to test in the newly established model of SCI+TBI during the last year of the grant.