Focus on Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
In Europe alone 2.5 million people suffer from a TBI each year, 1 million are admitted to a hospital and 75.000 patients will die. Numbers that are expected to increase in the years to come. “It is a very heterogeneous disease affecting all ages and it has a wide variety of causes with different prognosis and outcomes. Not only one medical specialty is responsible for the treatment of these patients, multidisciplinary collaboration both clinically as with regard to research, is the key to successful treating these patients”, states Hugo den Boogert, neurosurgical resident and main investigator of the Center-TBI study in the Radboud University Medical Center.
Center-TBI is a large multicenter study funded by the European Union and conducted in over more than 60 centers in the whole of Europe. Today already more than 1800 patients and their relatives have given permission to participate in this study. All the clinical information of these patients will be collected anonymously and they are asked to fill out questionnaires, and participate in a telephone-based interview during the one year follow up after the incident. After 6 months patients will come to a special Center-TBI outpatient clinic appointment where a psychologist will conduct a serie of neuropsychological tests to carefully assess which symptoms are still present.
In the end, this study will provide very valuable information on the etiology, treatment and prognosis of this disease and will certainly address its main goal: to improve the care of patients with TBI.
More information can be found on the website of Center-TBI by clicking on the logo. If you want to get in touch with the research team as a patient, relative of the patient or fellow researchers, you can send an e-mail to [email protected].