Treatment of Unawareness of Deficits in Patients with Acquired Brain Injury
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J Head Trauma Rehabil Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. E9–E30 Copyright c 2014 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Treatment of Unawareness of Deficits in Patients With Acquired Brain Injury: A Systematic Review Anne-Claire Schrijnemaekers, MSc; Sanne M. J. Smeets, MSc; Rudolf W. H. M. Ponds, PhD; Caroline M. van Heugten, PhD; Sascha Rasquin, PhD Objective: To review and evaluate the effectiveness and methodological quality of available treatment methods for unawareness of deficits after acquired brain injury (ABI). Methods: Systematic literature search for treatment studies for unawareness of deficits after ABI. Information concerning study content and reported effectiveness was extracted. Quality of the study reports and methods were evaluated. Results: A total of 471 articles were identified; 25 met inclusion criteria. 16 were uncontrolled or single-case studies. Nine were of higher quality: 2 randomized controlled trials, 5 single case experimental designs, 1 single-case design with pre- and posttreatment measurement, and 1 quasi-experimental controlled design. Overall, interventions consisted of multiple components including education and multimodal feedback on performance. Five of the 9 high-quality studies reported a positive effect of the intervention on unawareness in patients with some knowledge of their impairments. Effect sizes ranged from questionable to large. Conclusion: Patients with ABI may improve their awareness of their disabilities and possibly attain a level at which they personally experience problems when they occur. At present, because of lack of evidence, no recommendation can be made for treatment approaches for persons with severe impairment of self-awareness in the chronic phase of ABI. We recommended developing and evaluating theory-driven interventions specifically focused on disentangling the components of treatment that are successful in improving awareness. High-quality intervention studies are urgently needed using controlled designs (eg, single-case experimental designs, randomized controlled trials) based on a theoretic perspective with a detailed description of the content of the intervention and suitable outcome measures. Key words: awareness, brain injuries, intervention studies, literature review, rehabilitation CQUIRED BRAIN INJURY (ABI) can lead to ranges from 30% to 97%, depending on multiple factors A impairments in physical, emotional, cognitive, including the measurement instrument used, severity and social abilities. Diminished awareness of these of injury, and amount of time since injury.1,3–9 Areas impairments—a well-known clinical problem following of diminished functioning about which patients may ABI—is seen as compromise of the ability to appraise lack awareness include cognition, behavior, and inter- one’s strengths and weaknesses and the implications for personal skills as well as the effects their behavior have life, presently and in the future.1,2 Reported prevalence on others.10 Frontal lobe dysfunction has often been linked to impaired awareness of deficits, but currently there is no clinical consensus regarding the pathogenesis Author Affiliations: Rehabilitation Centre Adelante, Department of 10–12 Brain Injury, Hoensbroek (Ms Schrijnemaekers and Drs Rasquin, and underlying this phenomenon. Ponds); Adelante knowledge centre, Hoensbroek (Dr Rasquin); School for The concept of impaired awareness can be divided Mental Health and Neuroscience (MHeNS), Department of Psychiatry into different types of impairment. A practical model and Neuropsychology, Maastricht University (Ms Smeets and Drs Ponds 13 and van Heugten); Department of Medical Psychology, Maastricht defined by Crosson et al outlines a 3-stage hierarchi- University Medical Center (MUMC), Maastricht (Dr Ponds); and cal model in which intellectual awareness represents the Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Faculty of ability to understand that a function is impaired or to un- Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University (Dr van Heugten), The Netherlands. derstand the complications caused by the impairment. Emergent awareness is the ability to recognize a problem Supplemental digital content is available for this article. Direct URL citation appears in the printed text and is provided in the HTML and PDF versions when it is occurring, which requires the person to reach of this article on the journal’s Web site (www.headtraumarehab.com). a level of intellectual awareness similar to that before in- The authors declare no conflicts of interest. jury. Anticipatory awareness is the ability to foresee that a problem will occur as a result of having some type Corresponding Author: Anne-Claire Schrijnemaekers, MSc, Rehabilitation Centre Adelante, Department of Brain Injury, Zandbergsweg 111, 6432 CC of deficit. Other models concerning impaired aware- Hoensbroek, The Netherlands ([email protected]). ness of deficits after ABI also describe 3 components 1,14–18 DOI: 10.1097/01.HTR.0000438117.63852.b4 of awareness and show considerable overlap. In E9 Copyright © 2014 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. E10 JOURNAL OF HEAD TRAUMA REHABILITATION/SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2014 2 models,16,17 the psychological factor of denial is more, studies were excluded if the primary aim of the prominent. Taken together, these models include cog- intervention was related to visuospatial or somatosen- nitive components (basic cognitive abilities to perceive, sory neglect. Neglect is based on impaired mechanisms understand, and recognize situations), higher-order cog- of visual attention and, hence, represents a specific de- nitive components (self-regulation and anticipation), marcated area that lies outside the scope of this review. and a psychological component (with denial on 1 side Studies were independently selected on the basis of of the spectrum and acceptance on the other). title, abstract, and full text by the first 2 authors (A.C.S. The implications associated with impaired awareness and S.S.). In cases of disagreement, a third author (S.R.) of deficits include diminished motivation for treatment made the final decision. The reference lists of the se- (as the patient may not recognize or acknowledge the lected articles were examined for other potentially rele- need for intervention),19 worse treatment adherence and vant studies. If appropriate, the specific study cited was performance,20,21 and an unfavorable short- and long- tracked down and included in the review. term employment outcome.22,23 By contrast, patients with more intact intellectual awareness achieve better Data extraction independent living skills.24 Herein lies the challenge of treating patients with awareness problems. Data extraction was based on the checklist of items Currently, there are no well-established clinical guide- to consider from the Cochrane manual,29 together with lines for treating unawareness of deficits after ABI,25 de- data extraction methods from similar reviews.30,31 The spite an array of studies that have evaluated different following study characteristics were extracted from the treatments to improve awareness of deficits. The objec- articles: design of the study, number of patients, type of tive of this article is to review the available treatment intervention, effects on the awareness, and functional methods for impaired awareness and to provide a com- outcome measures. The overall effect of each interven- prehensive summary of their effectiveness. The current tion was summarized as positive (+), no effect (0), or review differs from previous reviews26–28 in that it has negative (−).32 Results were considered to be positive no restriction on the type of brain injury, intervention, when statistically significant at the P < .05 level. If no study design, and number of participants; it comprises a statistical test results were available, the interpretation broad spectrum of research of interventions that aim to of the effect was based on the interpretations made by improve awareness of deficits. The following questions the authors of the study in question. are addressed: (i) which interventions have been investi- In addition, we calculated effect sizes. gated and what are their specific characteristics and (ii) For independent group studies (eg, RCTs), how effective were these interventions? the standardized difference between means, Hedge’s g, was calculated where possible (ef- METHODS fect size = [(Meanexperimental group, postmeasurement − Meanexperimental, pre)/SDexperimental, pre] − [(Meancontrol, post Selection of articles 33 −Meancontrol, pre)/SDcontrol, pre]). An effect size of 0.2 A systematic literature search was performed using the is considered small, 0.5 medium, and 0.8 large.34 electronic databases PsycINFO (1887 to October 2012), For single-case studies (eg SCED), the percentage of PubMed (1953 to October 2012), Embase (1989 to nonoverlapping data (PND)35 was used as a measure of October 2012), The Cochrane Library (1890 to October effect size. For calculating the PND, the highest data 2012), and PsychBITE (1940 to October 2012). Free text point in the baseline phase needs to be identified. The words as well as index terms were combined. The search PND is then determined by calculating the percentage strategy used 3 categories: diagnosis (ABI), the specific of data points during the intervention phase exceeding condition (unawareness of deficits), and intervention. this level. A PND smaller than 50% reflects minimally The search was limited to human