Authors:

WILSON, B.A., Murre J., Tate., R., Shiel, A.M., Prigatano, G

Reference:

Year of publication:

2004

CBU number:

6110

Abstract:

How people recover from Brain Injury is poorly understood despite the fact that good understanding would help us plan and monitor our rehabilitation services, enable us to give better advice to families and allow us to improve the focus of rehabilitation. This symposium considers some of the issues involved in recovery from brain injury to help improve our understanding of the recovery process.The first paper introduces the concept of self repairing neural networks as a model for recovery from brain damage; it suggests that lesion size informs us of which rehabilitation strategy to implement. The second paper looks at patterns of recovery following traumatic brain injury and considers whether altering posture in TBI patients changes recovery patterns. The third paper is a twenty three year follow-up of 100 patients documenting the natural history of recovery from TBI and looks at the contribution of specific variables to psychosocial outcome. The last two papers present 124 case studies to see how individual patients can contribute to our understanding of recovery. One considers the cognitive and emotional recovery of a young woman reported to be in the vegetative state for almost 6 months. So recovery can occur even in cases some would consider hopeless. The final paper presents four patients who have been followed for 10 to 25 years . The main point made here is that individual choices can influence the course of recovery. We conclude with a summary of the main lessons that can be drawn from these papers.