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 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," says Walter Koroshetz, MD, deputy director of NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

"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," adds 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.

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.

"Uniform data makes it much easier to compare intervention results across a broad range of studies, providing innovative and unique insights that are not possible from a single study," notes Matthew McAuliffe, PhD, co-director of the FITBIR database and a member of NIH's Center for Information Technology (CIT). "This is part of a larger effort by the government to make taxpayer-funded research more broadly available and usable."

The database is expected to aid in the development of a system which can classify different types of traumatic brain injury and is targeted to determine which treatments are effective and for whom. Enhanced diagnostic criteria for concussions and milder injuries is also a focus, as are predictive markers to identify those at risk of developing conditions that have been linked to traumatic brain injury, such as Alzheimer's disease.

Release Date: August 29, 2011
Source: The National Institutes of Health