Team Grant : Pediatric concussion CIHR-NIH 2020

Concussion is recognized as a serious public health epidemic, particularly in children, where rates have doubled over the last decade, with an estimated 750,000 pediatric acute concussion visits to emergency departments (EDs) occurring annually in the United States alone. While many children experience symptom resolution within 2 weeks, approximately 33% experience ongoing cognitive, somatic, psychological, behavioural symptoms, or a combination of these symptoms, known as “Persistent Post-Concussive Symptoms”, or PPCS.

This funding opportunity represents the next step of the continuing Canadian and American investments into pediatric concussion research, care, and knowledge exchange.

This funding opportunity will support the Canadian team component of a multi-site, multidisciplinary, research team that works synergistically to discover, characterize, and validate a combination of biological measures for prognosis and/or monitoring recovery of persistent concussive symptoms with enrollment from multiple points of care and participants with a variety of injury mechanisms. Biological measures that are responsive may include, but are not limited to neuroimaging, functional measures, sensory processing, metabolomics, proteomics, and other biofluid-based assays. These biological measures should then be incorporated into risk stratification algorithms to inform clinical care and patient stratification for future clinical trials. A key component of this funding opportunity will be the broad sharing of clinical, neuroimaging, physiological, and biospecimen data to further advance research in the area of persistent concussive symptoms in early and middle adolescent (EMA; ages 11-17 years old) populations.