Winston-Salem, NC (PRWEB) October 11, 2013 Each year, U.S. emergency departments treat an estimated 173,285 sports- and recreation-related traumatic brain injuries, including concussions, among children and adolescents from birth to 19 years old, which equals almost 20 injured children every hour.* A concussion is a brain injury and all are serious, with most concussions occurring without loss of consciousness. Recognition and proper treatment can help prevent further injury or even death. Researchers recently found that contact in practice, not games, was the most significant variable when the number and force of head impacts in youth football players were measured over the course of a season. They concluded that less contact during practice could mean a lot less exposure to head injuries for young football players. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 62% of sports-related injuries occur during practice rather than in games. Learn more about the signs of concussions by viewing http://www.wakehealth.edu/CIPT/Awareness/Concussion-Facts.htm. In addition to funding research that studies the number of head impacts children experience while playing sports, our larger goal is to improve detection of and treatment for these head injuries, said Dr. J. Wayne Meredith, executive director of the Childress Institute for Pediatric Trauma, … Continue reading →

By David Sell The Philadelphia Inquirer Published: October 10, 2013 PHILADELPHIA QR Pharma is a five-year-old start-up company based in Berwyn, Pa., but the young firm has been able to connect with well-known people and groups as it seeks funding to make drugs to treat Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. In 2012, QR Pharma got $468,000 from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research to explore a compound called Posiphen as a potential treatment for Parkinson's. This grant is for work that will be led by Robert Nussbaum of the University of California, San Francisco, and Jack T. Rogers, an associate professor of psychiatry at the genetics and aging research unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. QR Pharma announced Tuesday that it received $3 million from the Army to study Posiphen as a treatment for traumatic brain injury. This grant is to study the medication in mice in two different trials, and will be conducted in conjunction with the University of California, Los Angeles. The UCLA doctors involved are Marie-Francoise Chesselet, chairwoman of the neurobiology department at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and David Hovda, who has been honored by the Army for his work in developing ways … Continue reading →

Public release date: 10-Oct-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ] Contact: Kayee Ip ip@aaos.org 847-384-4035 American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons ROSEMONT, Ill.In the United States, approximately 1.4 million people suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year. Of those injuries, three out of four are minor TBI (mTBI)a head injury that causes a temporary change in mental status including confusion, an altered level of consciousness, or perceptual or behavioral impairments. According to a literature review appearing in the October 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (JAAOS), falls and motor vehicle accidents are responsible for most cases of mTBI and also are a common cause of bone and joint injuries. "Musculoskeletal injuries are often seen concurrently with some studies estimating that 50 percent of patients with orthopaedic injuries also sustain a mTBI," says lead study author Richard L. Uhl, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon at Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y. Approximately 80 percent of patients who sustain a mTBI can be safely discharged from the emergency department and will fully recover and return to their baseline mental status. However, mTBI often goes undiagnosed initially because symptoms do not appear until the patient resumes everyday life. … Continue reading →

BERWYN, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- QR Pharma, Inc. (QR) is a clinical-stage specialty pharmaceutical company committed to developing therapeutics with novel approaches for the treatment of cognitive impairment after acute brain injury like concussions, head trauma and stroke or in chronic degeneration like Alzheimers and Parkinsons disease. QR and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) announce today they received a US Army grant in the amount of $3,000,000 to study Posiphen in two models of traumatic brain injury (TBI). We are extremely pleased to receive this funding from the USARMY, said Maria Maccecchini, PhD, CEO of QR Pharma. It enables us to continue our work with traumatic brain injury and hopefully stop the neurological damage that is the consequence of these devastating injuries. It also provides the resources necessary to progress our drug development and validates the scientific approach we have taken. Our collaborators Drs. Marie-Francoise Chesselet and David Hovda at UCLA have used TBI injury models to study brain trauma. Their models produce cognitive impairment, as assessed in the Morris Water Maze, and increase expression of tau, p-tau, APP, A and alpha-synuclein in the brain. Professor Marie-Francoise Chesselet, PhD, is Chair of the Department of Neurobiology in the David Geffen … Continue reading →