SEED-FUNDING - Age-related moil-moderate traumatic brain injury recovery and outcomes

This is a small seed-funding application to establish a partnership with a group based in Oxford and to develop a subsequent collaborative bid for research funds. This application was developed at a Scottish Brain Health ARC sandpit-workshop hosted recently at GCU and has been discussed with their program manager.

Ultimately, we want to conduct a study in which we will measure how well people recover from TBI and whether “brain age” affects this. We will characterise TBI recovery over time, try to understand why differences occur between people, and look at the effect of “brain age”. This will help us to deliver to better targeted treatments and rehabilitation. To do this we will need to measure the effects of TBI using brain imaging and blood tests alongside vision and cognitive tests at multiple occasions through the recovery process. This will be a complex and expensive project. This seed-funding application then focuses on the development of that future project. We plan to develop and to trial a cognitive-test delivered via an app and tablet computer, which we would use in our future project. We also intend to consult with groups of people with lived experience of TBI to explore what an acceptable testing program would look like for our future study. These groups will also test the usability of our data collection app. Finally, we will use these funds to build a diverse and expert group of researchers, medical professionals and those with lived experiences of TBI, bringing in people that augment our current teams’ strengths, which will let us deliver future impactful projects in TBI and brain health.