Efficacy of an intervention programme for rehabilitation of awareness of deficit after acquired brain injury: A pilot study

Abstract

This research provides evidence in favour of the effectiveness of implementing an intervention programme for AD in the context a global rehabilitation process for patients with ABI.

Improving Self-awareness After Acquired Brain Injury Leads to Enhancements in Patients’ Daily Living Functionality

“…The results of the present study are promising and highlight the importance of considering specific intervention programmes in self-awareness, in the context of a broader rehabilitation process. Previous research had demonstrated that specifically tackling this cognitive deficit during rehabilitation is effective at improving self-awareness of patients who had suffered ABI (Lundqvist et al, 2010;Schrijnemaekers et al, 2014;Villalobos et al, 2018).…”

“…This specific result suggests that the initial level of self-awareness might be a boundary for achieving meaningful functional outcome enhancements through a specific intervention programme. It seems reasonable that patients with very low initial selfawareness, despite experiencing large improvements in this dimension (Villalobos et al, 2018), were less likely to achieve a significant post-treatment self-awareness level to lead to a meaningful change in functionality. Still, the correlation analyses in the whole group, including those patients who did not undertake the self-awareness programme confirmed that improvements in selfawareness are associated with enhancements in functional outcome.…”

“…However, a limitation in almost all these studies is that they do not provide a clear description of the activities during the intervention sessions and that measures of functional outcome do not examine transfer and/or generalization to activities other than the ones in the rehabilitation process (Engel et al, 2017). In a recent study by our group, we have demonstrated that implementing a structured intervention programme on self-awareness, developed from a biopsychosocial approach and relied on therapeutic strategies of proven effectiveness, is useful at improving self-awareness of patients who had suffered ABI (Schrijnemaekers, Smeets, Ponds, van Heugten, & Rasquin, 2014; see Villalobos et al (2018) for a detailed description of the intervention programme). However, in the present study, we examined whether improvements in self-awareness induced by the intervention programme are associated with an enhancement in functional outcome of those patients with ABI.…”

“…Measuring self-awareness is not straightforward and different methodologies have been employed, such as considering discrepancies between patient's and a relative's scores on a standardized questionnaire (e.g., the "Patient Competency Rating Scale", Prigatano et al, 1986). To avoid potential biases on scores based on discrepancies between the patient´s and collat-eral´s ratings (Richardson, McKay, & Ponsford, 2015), we used a self-awareness scale developed in a semi-structured interview format for our former study (Villalobos, Bilbao, Espejo, & García-Pacios, 2018). According to previous studies that have raised the importance of separately assessing the awareness of the deficits and the awareness of the functional implications of such deficits (Giacino & Cicerone, 1998), this scale consisted of three main areas of assessment: Awareness of Injury, Awareness of Deficit and Awareness of Disability.…”

The flubbed body: Pathological body size representation in personal neglect

“…The Awareness of Deficit Scale is a semi-structured scale developed to measure the level of awareness of deficit for a group of patients with acquired brain injury (Villalobos et al, 2018). The scale considers three main areas of awareness: awareness of injury, awareness of deficit and awareness of disability.…”