WVU’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute marked the official opening of its NeuroPerformance Innovation Center on Thursday.
A multidisciplinary Concussion and Brain Injury Care Team — neurologists, physiatrists (physical medicine), neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, vision and balance therapists — assesses and treats the physical, emotional and cognitive consequences of concussion.
It specializes in helping athletes, youth, first responders and domestic violence survivors, said Dr. Javier Cardenas, RNI Sports Neurology Division chief and senior medical advisor of the NFL Concussion Protocol, Player Health & Safety Committee.
The center gathers the medical specialists, therapists and researchers into the same space, so they can take the research and turn it into advanced therapy and performance enhancement for patients, he said.
“This is a unique place. This is a special place where the innovation is the core, the collaboration is key to the success, and there isn’t anywhere else in the world that can do it,” he said.
The center has been in development for a year, he said, and the multidisciplinary comprehensive team has been operating since January, seeing more than 1,500 patients.
There are three categories of consequences of concussion, Cardenas said. One is physical: headaches, dizziness, vision changes, sleep problems. Another is cognitive: focus, short-term memory, calculation, finding words, for example. And the third is mood and behavior: anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts and actions.
For athletes, “We are taking everything that we’ve learned about concussion and brain injury and recovery, and we are applying it to the prevention of injury as well as performance enhancement for athletes,” he said. They pursue innovative research modules, learning where the athletes best perform and where they are weak, they strengthen their weaknesses, work on their strengths and help them perform.
But the mission is broader, to take all the knowledge gained at the professional level, including the NFL, and apply it to those who don’t have such opportunities, he said.
The center offers free concussion baseline testing for all athletic trainers in the state. The first responder program offers assessment of agility and strength, tracks sleep and brain function. The DVIP domestic violence program offers a VIP experience for survivors: The nurse coordinates a whole day for them, including use of the float tank and food.
Amanda Miller, an occupational therapist specializing in vision rehabilitation and brain therapy, was recruited from Phoenix, Ariz., to work at the center. Effects to the vision and vestibular system (balance and spatial orientation) are often overlooked in those who’ve had concussions, she said.
The program there includes immersive virtual reality and eye exercises to treat that, she said.
She demonstrated the Bertec, shaped like a ball chopped in half. It employs opto-kinetics to help patients deal with motion sensitivity and sickness, dizziness and balance problems. It contains a driving simulator where the patient standing on the platform shifts weight and posture to move around approaching obstacles.
In another room she performs eye-sync testing, which measures eye movements to detect abnormalities in the eyes. From her years of experience, in working with the WVU soccer team, “I could tell which ones had had concussions by just the way their eyes moved.” From that she was able to help them understand the symptoms they were experiencing.
Hayden Dewig is the center’s research scientist. She showed the float tank room, where a patient floats in quiet for an hour. “Some people fall asleep, some people don’t.” The salt water aids physical recovery, but also can help mitigate anxiety, depression and other mental health issues associated with concussion.
One of her areas of research, she said, will be determining how long the beneficial effects of the float tank experience last.
She showed another room equipped with what looks like a tanning booth, but isn’t. The booth provides “photobiomodulation therapy,” what she calls more simply red-light therapy.
When turned on, the booth floods the room with bright red light. A poster on the wall explains that the red and near-red light absorbs through the skin, into the individual cells, stimulating a chain of reactions that accelerate healing and restore normal function.
A 20-minute session, she said, can aid wound healing and performance enhancement and recovery.
In conjunction with the opening of the center, the “Rockefeller Concussion Network” is releasing its first episode on YouTube. Cardenas hosts the show. In its inaugural episode, he interviews Dr. Allen Sills, NFL chief medical officer, about the league’s new innovations and rules to reduce concussion and head impacts. To view the episode, visit youtu.be/yngQkD7n3RQ.
