Background: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is in the developed countries the most common cause of death and disability in childhood. Aim: The purpose of this study is to estimate the incidence of TBI for children and young people in an urbanised region of the Netherlands and to describe relevant characteristics of this group. Methods: Patients, aged 1 month - 24 years who presented with traumatic brain injury at the Erasmus University Hospital (including the Sophia Children's Hospital) in 2007 and 2008 were included in a retrospective study. Data were collected by means of diagnosis codes and search terms for TBI in patient records. The incidence of TBI in the different referral areas of the hospital for standard, specialised and intensive patient care was estimated. Results: 472 patients met the inclusion criteria. The severity of the Injury was classified as mild in 342 patients, moderate in 50 patients and severe in 80 patients. The total incidence of traumatic brain injury in the referral area of the Erasmus University Hospital was estimated at 113.9 young people per 100.000. The incidence for mild traumatic brain injury was estimated at 104.4 young people, for moderate 6.1 and for severe 3.4 young people per 100.000. Conclusion: The ratio for mild, moderate and severe traumatic brain injury in children and young people was 33.7e1.8e1.In the mild TBI group almost 17% of the patients reported sequelae. The finding that 42% of them had a normal brain CT scan at admission underwrites the necessity of careful follow up of children and young people with mild TBI.
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This article examines the possibility of the futuristic assumption that the human mind will converge with artificial intelligence technology to create an enhancement of consciousness. By studying how a correlation between consciousness and the brain is made through visual tools that are used in neuroscience, this article elaborates on how these findings affect research that is done in philosophy on the concept of consciousness. This article proposes a new approach on studying the brain, by examining it as a theoretical object, which gives every research field the possibility to argue over the truth in the images that are created of the brain.
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In this chapter it is argued that self-direction is currently well above the head of the majority of youngsters and even of many adults. Evidence for this conclusion stems from developmental and brain research. However, for various reasons it is important that people develop the competences that are necessary for self-direction. To what degree is it possible to develop these competences? Are they 'learnable'? What can education contribute?
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Introduction Around 25% of metastatic breast cancer (mBC) patients develop brain metastases, which vastly affects their overall survival and quality of life. According to the current clinical guidelines, regular magnetic resonance imaging screening is not recommended unless patients have recognized central nervous system-related symptoms. Patient Presentation The patient participated in the EFFECT study, a randomized controlled trial aimed to assess the effects of a 9-month structured, individualized and supervised exercise intervention on quality of life, fatigue and other cancer and treatment-related side effects in patients with mBC. She attended the training sessions regularly and was supervised by the same trainer throughout the exercise program. In month 7 of participation, her exercise trainer detected subtle symptoms (e.g., changes in movement pattern, eye movement or balance), which had not been noticed or reported by the patient herself or her family, and which were unlikely to have been detected by the oncologist or other health care providers at that point since symptoms were exercise related. When suspicion of brain metastases was brought to the attention of the oncologist by the exercise trainer, the response was immediate, and led to early detection and treatment of brain metastases. Conclusion and clinical implications The brain metastases of this patient were detected earlier due to the recognition of subtle symptoms detected by her exercise trainer and the trust and rapid action by the clinician. The implementation of physical exercise programs for cancer patients requires well-trained professionals who know how to recognize possible alterations in patients and also, good communication between trainers and the medical team to enable the necessary actions to be taken.
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From the article: Abstract Over the last decades, philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that the brain constitutes only one of several contributing factors to cognition, the other factors being the body and the world. This position we refer to as Embodied Embedded Cognition (EEC). The main purpose of this paper is to consider what EEC implies for the task interpretation of the control system. We argue that the traditional view of the control system as involved in planning and decision making based on beliefs about the world runs into the problem of computational intractability. EEC views the control system as relying heavily on the naturally evolved fit between organism and environment. A ‘lazy’ control structure could be ‘ignorantly successful’ in a ‘user friendly’ world, by facilitating the transitory creation of a flexible and integrated set of behavioral layers that are constitutive of ongoing behavior. We close by discussing the types of questions this could imply for empirical research in cognitive neuroscience and robotics.
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De incidentie van niet aangeboren hersenletsel (NAH) bij personen in de leeftijd tot 25 jaar in Nederland is aanzienlijk, met ca. 18.000 nieuwe gevallen per jaar. Kinderen en jongeren met NAH hebben naast fysieke, cognitieve en emotionele beperkingen, een significant lager niveau van sociale participatie dan hun gezonde leeftijdgenoten. Het gebruik van de Nintendo Wii, een spelcomputer die bewegingen op natuurlijke en intuïtieve wijze uitlokt, lijkt mogelijkheden te bieden om contacten met anderen en actieve vrijetijdsbesteding bij jongeren met NAH te stimuleren. In deze studie wordt onderzocht wat het effect is van het gebruik van de Nintendo Wii bij kinderen en jongeren met NAH op fysiek, cognitief en sociaal functioneren. Om dit te onderzoeken is een multicenter, observationele pilotstudie verricht, bij 50 kinderen en jongeren met NAH in de leeftijd van 6-29 jaar die onder controle of behandeling zijn van een revalidatiearts. De interventie, van in totaal 12 weken, startte met 2 trainingssessies van 60 minuten, waarbij de toe te passen games werden gekozen passend bij zelf gekozen behandeldoelen (te verbeteren functies of activiteiten) en uitvoerbaar gezien de individuele beperkingen van de deelnemer. Vervolgens werd er minimaal 2 keer in de week gegamed. Er was wekelijks contact met een therapeut per telefoon of e-mail. De effectmetingen (vragenlijsten en een neuropsychologische test) werden verricht aan het begin en einde van de interventie en betroffen het fysiek, cognitief en sociaal functioneren. De statistische analyse bestond uit vergelijkingen van de uitkomstmaten tussen 0 en 12 weken met behulp van gepaarde t-toetsen, Wilcoxon-Signed-Rank tests en chi-kwadraat toetsen. Deze eerste pilotstudie naar de effecten van het gamen met de Nintendo Wii bij jongeren met NAH laat significante verbetering zien op het fysiek en cognitief functioneren, en niet op het sociaal functioneren. Deze resultaten zijn aanleiding om de effectiviteit van de Nintendo Wii in deze patiëntengroep in een grotere, gecontroleerde studie verder te onder ABSTRACT Aim: To explore the effects of usage of the Nintendo Wii on physical, cognitive and social functioning in patients with acquired brain injury (ABI). Methods: This multicenter, observational proof-of-concept study included children, adolescents and young adults with ABI aged 6-29 years. A standardized, yet individually tailored 12-week intervention with the Nintendo Wii was delivered by trained instructors. The treatment goals were set on an individual basis and included targets regarding physical, mental and/or social functioning. Outcome assessments were done at baseline and after 12 weeks, and included: the average number of minutes per week of recreational physical activity; the CAPE (Children's Assessment of Participation and Enjoyment); the ANT (Amsterdam Neuropsychological Tasks); the achievement of individual treatment goals (Goal Attainment Scaling); and quality of life (PedsQL; Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory). Statistical analyses included paired t-tests or Wilcoxon-Signed-Rank tests. Results: 50 patients were included, (31 boys and 19 girls; mean age 17.1 years (SD 4.4)), of whom 45 (90%) completed the study. Significant changes of the amount of physical activity, speed of information processing, attention, response inhibition and visual-motor coordination (p<0.05) were seen after 12 weeks, whereas there were no differences in CAPE or PedsQL scores. Two-thirds of the patients reported an improvement of the main treatment goal. Conclusion: This study supports the potential benefits of gaming in children and youth with ABI.
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Emotional reactions to marketing stimuli are essential to tourist destination marketing, yet difficult to validly measure. A neuromarketing experiment was peformed to establish whether brain event-related potentials (ERPs), elicited by destination photos, can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of tourist destination marketing content in movies. Two groups of participants viewed pictures from the cities of Bruges and Kyoto. Prior to viewing the pictures, one group saw an excerpt from the movie In Bruges, which positively depicts Bruges’ main tourist attractions. The other group saw a movie excerpt that did not feature Bruges (the Rum Diary). An early emotional response was osberved to the subsequently presented Bruges pictures for the In Bruges group only; no reliable between-group differences were found in ERPs to pictures from Kyoto. In conclusion, EEG-based neuromarketing is a valuable tool for evaluating the effectiveness of destination marketing, and popular movies can positively influence affective destination image.
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Review: With great interest we have read the paper “Pregnancy Screening before Diagnostic Radiography in Emergency Department; an Educational Review” by A.I. Abushouk et al. (1). We agree with the authors that unnecessary fetal radiation exposure should be avoided and that pregnancy screening can be a means to accomplish this. However, in their paper the authors suggest in several instances that radiological imaging during pregnancy can lead to teratogenic effects. In the Abstract it is stated: “Radiation exposure during pregnancy may have serious teratogenic effects to the fetus. Therefore, checking the pregnancy status before imaging women of child bearing age can protect against these effects.”, and in the Introduction: “Therefore, checking the pregnancy status before imaging women of child bearing age can protect against radiation teratogenic effects.” We strongly disagree with these statements: common radiological imaging will usually not give rise to fetal radiation doses high enough to lead to teratogenesis. The statements in the paper may lead to unnecessary worrying of pregnant women and it may discourage themfrom undergoing medically necessary radiological examinations.
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Semantic unification during sentence comprehension has been associated with amplitude change of the N400 in event-related potential (ERP) studies, and activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. However, the specificity of this activation to semantic unification remains unknown. To more closely examine the brain processes involved in semantic unification, we employed simultaneous EEG-fMRI to time-lock the semantic unification related N400 change, and integrated trial-by-trial variation in both N400 and BOLD change beyond the condition-level BOLD change difference measured in traditional fMRI analyses. Participants read sentences in which semantic unification load was parametrically manipulated by varying cloze probability. Separately, ERP and fMRI results replicated previous findings, in that semantic unification load parametrically modulated the amplitude of N400 and cortical activation. Integrated EEG-fMRI analyses revealed a different pattern in which functional activity in the left IFG and bilateral supramarginal gyrus (SMG) was associated with N400 amplitude, with the left IFG activation and bilateral SMG activation being selective to the condition-level and trial-level of semantic unification load, respectively. By employing the EEG-fMRI integrated analyses, this study among the first sheds light on how to integrate trial-level variation in language comprehension.
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Purpose: This case study is presented to inform the reader of potential speech, language, cognitive, and emotional characteristics in preadolescent cluttering. Method: This case study describes a 10-year-old boy who started to clutter during preadolescence. The case illustrates that, in some adolescents, cluttering can co-occur with temporary stuttering-like behavior. In this case, signs of disturbances in speech-language production associated with behavioral impulsiveness as a young child were noted. Speech, language, cognitive, and emotional results of the case are reported in detail. Results: The changes in fluency development are reported and discussed within the context of changes in the adolescent brain as well as adolescent cognitive and emotional development. While being unaware of their speech condition before adolescence, during preadolescence, the changes in brain organization lead to an increase in rate and a decrease in speech control. Given that the client had limited understanding of what was occurring, they were at risk of developing negative communication attitudes. Speech-language therapists are strongly advised to monitor children with cluttering signals in the early years of their adolescence.
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