Traumatic brain injury: Neuropsychological rehabilitation

Brain plasticity is understood as the capacity of the brain to evolve, or recover after an aggression. Even in the adult brain, plasticity plays an important role in functional recovery after acquired brain injury, which might have significant relevance to the practice of neurorehabilitation. It is of special interest to identify the mechanisms underlying plasticity for functional improvement after injury. A very appropriate platform to study the principles followed by brain plasticity is the study of brain activity changes after brain injury and posterior recovery. To reach this goal we analyzed the magnetoencephalographic recordings from 15 traumatic brain injured patients before and after neuropsychological rehabilitation and 14 healthy controls, in resting state condition. We compared the entropy and complexity in these three conditions to estimate how the brain injury impact alters the dynamical pattern of the brain activity. After traumatic brain injury the brain is globally more complex and entropic, principally in frontal and occipital areas. These values were restored after rehabilitation, statistically approaching to the healthy control reference. Change in patient complexity negatively correlates with PCRS, reflecting the patient’s current ability to adapt to daily living activities. The characterization of neurophysiological changes would allow us to know the mechanism of recovery and the possible identification of recovery markers.