The National Neurotrauma Society 30th Annual Conference (Phoenix July 22-25,2012)

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This grant application is to support in part the National Neurotrauma Society (NNS)'s 30th Annual Conference at the Arizona Biltmore Resort, Phoenix AZ. This year's three and a half day conference from July 22-25, 2012 has 22 exciting sessions, including six parallel sessions that cover a balance of preclinical and clinical research on both traumatic brain and spinal cord injury. In this application, we seek funding support for the 20 best pre and post -doctoral students ($10,000), to attend the meeting, and $15,000 towards partial support for the travel of 30 invited speakers. The theme of this year's conference is "The Spectrum of Neurotrauma" - we will focus on several interlinked and topical issues in neurotrauma. In the TBI subarea, one of the understudied areas is pediatric brain injury, which will be featured in this conference. On the other hand, during this past year, we continue to see an explosion of interests and publications in blast brain injury (Scheibel, et al., 2011; Bass et a., 2011) which will be featured in the conference. Regarding spinal cord injury (SCI), there will be a focused session on various functional deficits and complications after SCI. In terms of neurotrauma management and treatment, we will provide state-of-the-art overviews of the utility of biomarkers and new MRI imaging technology, promising preclinical drug treatment and update of on-going clinical trials in TBI and SCI, including the two on-going progesterone trials. We will also cover the concept that neurotrauma is not only an acute medical problem, but can evolve into a chronic medical condition for the patients. Thus more sophisticated research and clinical tools in neuro-rehabilitation will be the key, as is the understanding of the molecular evolution from TBI to chronic neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) (Stern et al., 2011). Lastly, we will also invite several international speakers to talk about their TBI management experience in their own countries for cross-learning. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: We expect to have 700 plus attendees including (physicians, nurses, neuropsychologist and researchers (MD, PhD, professors, postdocs and graduate students) attending the National Neurotrauma Society's 30th Annual Conference in Phoenix AZ (July 2012) Over 1.5 million new cases of traumatic brain injury present to emergency rooms in the United States and over 50,000 die each year. In addition, approximately 12,000 new spinal cord injuries occur each year. The theme of this year's conference is "The Spectrum of Neurotrauma".