Thursday, April 14, 2016

New Recommendations Link Better Sleep to Improved Concussion Outcomes

This should be able to be applied to stroke. But extremely unlikely since I have seen no indication that there is any strategy in stroke for helping survivors recover.
http://dgnews.docguide.com/new-recommendations-link-better-sleep-improved-concussion-outcomes?
A national group of sleep and brain injury specialists recommends specific steps to test and develop sleep-related treatments to improve the outcome of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI).
The recommendations, developed by a sleep specialist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, along with experts from medicine, the military, and private industry, appear online ahead of the print edition of the journal Neurotherapeutics.
“Clinical practice guidelines in mTBI or concussion are woefully lacking, despite spending tens of millions of dollars over the past decade,” said Emerson M. Wickwire, PhD, University of Maryland. “We still are not very good at improving long-term outcomes and reducing the prevalence of patients who end up with long-term effects of concussion.”
“Leaders in TBI identified 4 topical areas that may be potential pathways to improve outcomes in mTBI: neuroinflammation, neuropsychiatric disease, chronic pain, and of course, disturbed sleep,” he said.
Wickwire says sleep and brain injury appear to share several overlapping brain circuits.
“Structures damaged in brain injury may cause alterations in sleep/wake cycles,” he said. “At the same time, sleep disturbances, which are reported by roughly half of people with brain injury, worsen quality of life, make treatment more difficult, and may well change the way the brain heals itself.”
Given the shared neurophysiologic underpinnings of sleep and mTBI, Wickwire said disturbed sleep and clinical sleep disorders represent treatment targets that can be modified to improve outcomes and quality of life in mTBI.
The group has developed several recommendations to improve sleep outcomes in patients with mild TBI. They include data repositories where sleep-specific information could be incorporated into existing TBI repositories and aggregated across multiple centres; serial assessment of mild TBI patients at various time intervals post-injury to help identify those who may develop long-term sleep disorders; research targeting treatments for mTBI-specific sleep disorders; sleep-specific education for head injury medical professionals; and increased access to sleep treatment services at head trauma centres.
Regarding treatment, Wickwire said there are many questions to be answered.
“On the one hand, is sleep in and of itself therapeutic and can we manipulate sleep through pharmacologic or other means, in a way that will improve healing and recovery following brain injury?” he said.
A second group of questions deals with clinical sleep disorders -- insomnia, obstructive sleep apnoea, circadian rhythm disorders, which affect sleep scheduling, parasomnias, such as sleep walking, and fatigue that develops following brain injury.
“We have effective treatments for these sleep disorders in non-brain-injured patients, but we need to adapt these treatments to patients with mTBI, who might have unique needs,” said Wickwire. “There may also be sleep problems that are unique to patients with mTBI for which there are no currently effective treatments.”
“Success at improving outcomes in patients with mild traumatic brain injury will require sustained effort on many fronts, and from a variety of disciplines,” said E. Albert Reece, MD, University of Maryland School of Medicine. “The recommendations in this paper set forth a clear pathway to reach that goal.”
SOURCE: University of Maryland School of Medicine

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