ALLEN BROWN: Everyone with a traumatic brain injury, including concussive traumatic brain injury, for example related to sport related injury, brings to that injury a unique set of circumstances related to their age, related to their status or level of education, related to their underlying job, whether they're a professional athlete, or they're a clinician, or they're a parent. And so we approach clinical management of concussive injury as we approach clinical management of all traumatic brain injury. And that is to take an individual and their specific circumstances and listen to their specific clinical needs, and base any clinical evaluation and treatment plan on their unique clinical needs.
And so regardless of the cause of this injury, we at Mayo Clinic, we are integrated into all of the practices that see people whose brain has been altered by injury or disease. For example, we're integrated with the sports medicine practice. We see all concussion individuals that have prolonged symptoms that don't resolve as most do reasonably quickly. For individuals, for example, that have a brain tumor and have cognitive or other kinds of brain related limitations, we are integrated into the neurooncology practice and the neurosurgical practice. The cerebral vascular neurology practice, we are integrated both in the hospital and the outpatient to provide rehabilitation care for individuals. And in every other practice that is in the institution, the Division of Brain Rehabilitation is integrated into Mayo Clinic practice here not just in Rochester, but in the Midwest to provide this kind of customized evaluations and treatment programs based on an individual's need.
Beyond that, we also-- specific to sport really concussion, there is an enterprise wide integrated group from Rochester, and Florida, and Arizona, and we meet by teleconference every month. And we coordinate our practices. We've developed brain imaging protocols that are consistent across the enterprise for concussive and traumatic brain injury. We've developed common approaches to sport-related and other kinds of brain injury. So we really have brought together the enterprise with people with similar expertise and similar clinical experience and interests to really make this an enterprise wide effort to some extent standardize, but also to develop a common approach to clinical evaluation and treatment management. But as I said everyone is an individual. And they are based on their individual specific needs.
