Interventions That Support or Involve Caregivers or Families of Patients with Traumatic Injury: a Systematic Review

Abstract

Studies showed mixed patterns of intervention effects on caregiver and patient outcomes; evidence about intervention impact is inconclusive. This review is the first to identify caregiving interventions for patients with TBI and polytrauma and extends past reviews about patients with PTSD. Limitations include a small evidence base, low study quality, disparate methods, varied outcome measures, and high heterogeneity. PROSPERO Registration CRD42017053516.

Embarking on discovering the mechanisms of resilience: combining language use analysis with neuroscience.

“…It is known that a high frequency of singular and plural first pronoun usage is an indicator of depression and PTSD 25,[73][74][75][76][77][78] . We examined singular first pronoun occurrence in text data from Holocaust survivors, controls and PTSD sufferers, consisting of people who experienced trauma years ago, including childhood trauma.…”

Identifying treatment effects of an informal caregiver education intervention to increase days in the community and decrease caregiver distress: a machine-learning secondary analysis of subgroup effects in the HI-FIVES randomized clinical trial

“…Strengthening caregiver skills, support, and connection to health system resources, can reduce burden [6,7] and psychological symptoms [8] and improve the ability of caregivers to care for patients at home [9][10][11]. However, systematic reviews of interventions for caregivers of multiple patient populations show mixed results [12][13][14][15][16]. By and large these systematic reviews were rigorously designed and included randomized controlled trial (RCT) design studies which lend credence to these results.…”

Protocol for a clinical trial of telehealth-based social communication skills training for people with traumatic brain injury and their communication partners

“…Recent systematic reviews (Kreitzer, Kurowski, & Bakas, 2018;Shepherd-Banigan et al, 2018) have identified several other studies with a similar focus on dyad-based interventions for people with TBI. These interventions have targeted areas such as providing education, problem-solving support, advocacy training and strategies relating to cognition, behaviour, interpersonal skills and home environment (Brown et al, 2015;Moriarty et al, 2016;Powell, Fraser, Brockway, Temkin, & Bell, 2016;Sinnakaruppan, Downey, & Morrison, 2005).…”

“…We designed this protocol using a rigorous approach to minimise risk of bias. Systematic reviews within the field of TBI interventions have noted methodological shortcomings of previous research (Kreitzer et al, 2018;Shepherd-Banigan et al, 2018). Recommendations to improve the quality and rigour of intervention studies include randomisation of participants, description of participants' severity of cognitive impairments, reporting of treatment fidelity, larger sample sizes, follow-up of participants over time, consideration of intervention acceptability and quality of life measures.…”

“…Recommendations to improve the quality and rigour of intervention studies include randomisation of participants, description of participants' severity of cognitive impairments, reporting of treatment fidelity, larger sample sizes, follow-up of participants over time, consideration of intervention acceptability and quality of life measures. Problems with outcome measures include lack of any independently rated outcomes (Rietdijk et al, 2012), and the diversity of assessment tools used across studies which limits the conclusions which can be drawn from meta-analyses (Honan et al, 2017;Shepherd-Banigan et al, 2018). This protocol aims to address these methodological concerns.…”