Grant: Fellowship - Priority Announcement: Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major problem worldwide. Each year, more than 10 million people suffer a TBI. Sadly, despite over 25 years of research and many clinical trials, to date, there are no pharmaceutical treatments for TBI. This has been attributed in part to a lack of preclinical assessment in animal models. Surprisingly, although impaired cognitive function and memory are some of the most pervasive deficits following a TBI, only one type of task is typically used to measure cognition in animals (a test of spatial learning known as the Morris water maze). This leads to a simplistic view of the multifaceted phenomenon of cognition. To address this concern, the current series of studies seeks to develop improved methods for assessing cognition after TBI in rats. After delivering a frontal TBI, we will first assess the most basic type of learning that occurs as rats are rewarded for the learned behavior of pressing a lever according to different schedules of reward delivery. Once performance on these basic schedules has been established, more complex tasks will be evaluated in which we measure how motivation, temporal judgment, attention and impulsivity are affected by TBI. The final portion of this study will utilize these tasks to evaluate the relationship between substance abuse and brain injury by examining how injured rats self-administer cocaine, followed by what happens during forced abstinence and finally look at reacquisition of self-administration (a model of relapse). The outcome of this research could influence how pharmaceutical agents are evaluated before going to clinical trials. Expansion of testing into these domains for pharmaceutical evaluation, could help reduce the potential of an ineffective drug proceeding on to clinical trials. Ultimately, research of this kind - on cognitive behavioral processes after frontal TBI- could make the drug-discovery process more cost-efficient and lead to better outcomes for patients who suffer from TBI.