SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) - Roughly 2.5 million Americans suffer traumatic brain injuries every year. They can cause death or major disability but no matter the severity, the care a person receives in the first six months after the injury is critical.
As part of its Neurorecovery Clinic, UCSF Health has recently launched a Post-Acute Traumatic Brain Injury Program to support patients during this most important period.
The first step to better treatment is really understanding how the injury happened, according to Dr. Cathra Halabi, Neurologist and Director of the Neurorecovery Clinic at UCSF Health.
"If there's a force that's transmitted to and through the brain that's sufficient enough to cause a disruption of brain function, even if it's temporary, then that person is likely to have sustained a concussive head injury or a traumatic brain injury or TBI. And so there could be any number of causes and there isn't necessarily always a blunt head injury. A concussive event or a TBI can happen if there's sufficient whiplash or body checking in sports, falls, and so on. So the mechanism of brain injury can be quite broad," Dr. Halabi told KCBS Radio's Bret Burkhart on this week's episode of "As Prescribed."
The mechanism of injury is just one piece of the puzzle. Every single person brings a different set of circumstances to the brain injury. And so, even though a pattern of symptoms follow a brain injury, the circumstances for one person's recovery may be quite different than the next.
"There's kind of an arc of a story that every person brings to the injury, who they were beforehand, what medical or other risk factors they had at the time of injury, what happened, what was the context of the injury, and then what is the recovery experience going to be like," said Dr. Halabi. "We're all very excited to be moving toward a world in which we have opportunities for better characterization so that we can identify treatment targets."
Dr. Halabi said having a lens of characterization to be able to assess somebody more precisely will lend itself to more treatment options down the line.
"The first six months are particularly of high yield because more and more we're learning that early assessment, early education, early reassurance, and counseling, that all in aggregate goes a really long way in terms of mitigating some of these symptoms from chronicity. So rather than having someone kind of wait for weeks or months on end and assume that things will get better on their own, which in some cases will happen, we'd much rather be available to offer that early counseling and education and reassurance," she said.
The UCSF Post-Acute Traumatic Brain Injury Program includes a broad team of specialists to provide in-depth consultations and comprehensive, personalized treatment plans.
"Focusing on harmonizing sort of clinical practice across disciplines, which include primary care, physical therapy, neurology, neurosurgery, et cetera, so that we can offer better wraparound care for patients, no matter which specialist or frontline providers is actually evaluating the person," said Dr. Halabi.
Listen to this week's "As Prescribed" to learn more. You can also listen to last week's episode to hear how distress and depression can worsen type-1 diabetes, here .
DOWNLOAD the Audacy App
SIGN UP and follow KCBS Radio
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
"As Prescribed" is sponsored by UCSF.
Most Popular
Comments / 0