The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), in partnership with the Department of Defense, is building a central database on traumatic brain injuries, the organization said.
The Federal Interagency Traumatic Brain Injury Research (FITBIR) database, funded at $10 million over four years, is designed to boost 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 comparison of results across studies.
Cases of traumatic brain injury are highly variable, involving different causes, locations within the brain, and kinds of damage to brain tissue, the NIH said. Such variability makes it difficult for clinicians to treat patients, predict long-term outcomes, and investigate new therapies, and studies often report different kinds of data on patients, obtained through various tests and measures, further impeding comparison of data across studies.
The new database will address these issues by collecting uniform data on traumatic brain injury, including brain imaging scans and neurological test results, according to the NIH.
