News From the Cause
NIH database will speed research toward better prevention, diagnosis and treatment of traumatic brain injury (NIH.GOV)
September 01, 2011
The National Institutes of Health, in partnership with the Department of Defense, is building a central database on traumatic brain injuries. The Federal Interagency Traumatic Brain Injury Research (FITBIR) database, funded at $10 million over four years, is designed to accelerate comparative effectiveness research on brain injury treatment and diagnosis. It will serve as a central repository for new data, link to current databases and allow valid comparison of results across studies.
"There are many traumatic brain injury studies whose value to scientific research and clinical care could be greatly enhanced by transforming the data into a common, easily available format," said Walter Koroshetz, M.D., deputy director of NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).
About 1.7 million people in the United States sustain traumatic brain injuries each year from common causes such as auto accidents and falls. In addition, American Service members serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world face unique risks of traumatic brain injury from routine military operations, enemy fire and improvised explosive devices. According to the DoD, in the past 12 years, more than 200,000 Service members deployed worldwide have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, adding to the urgent need for preventive methods and treatments. Total costs of traumatic brain injury in the United States — including medical care, lost wages and other expenses — exceed $60 billion.
"Despite the great burden of neurotrauma incidence, developing objective diagnostics and treatments has proven especially challenging for the medical community. Only by combining efforts through initiatives such as the FITBIR database can we hope to make major progress in this field," said Col. Dallas Hack, director of the U.S. Army Combat Casualty Research Program and joint chairperson for the Defense Health Program.
Treatments remain limited despite improved surgeries and rehabilitation techniques for people with brain injuries. Cases of traumatic brain injury are highly variable, involving different causes, locations within the brain and different kinds of damage to brain tissue. Such variability makes it difficult for clinicians to treat patients, predict long-term outcomes and investigate new therapies. Also, studies often report different kinds of data on patients, obtained through various tests and measures, further impeding comparison of data across studies. The FITBIR database will address these challenges by collecting uniform and high-quality data on traumatic brain injury, including brain imaging scans and neurological test results. The data will be obtained with informed consent and stripped of any patient-identifying information. Click here to view more
