For immediate release: December 15, 2003
For more information, contact Susan Griffith at 216-368-1004 or susan.griffith@case.edu

CLEVELAND—When a teacher asked a youth recovering from a brain injury to "boot up" the computer, the teen kicked it. Such misinterpretations of word meanings, sarcasms and social cues are common for teens with head injuries and have long-range consequences in alienating the individual from peers, family members and co-workers.

Angela Ciccia

Case Western Reserve University communication scientist Angela Ciccia wants to better understand what causes these social language misinterpretations as she begins a one-year study in January. She will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to find out what part of the brain fires during communications in social situations of normal teens.

The research has the support of a New Investigator's Grant from the American Speech Language Hearing Foundation and is one of the first to use this technology to study teen communication.

"Historically we have been doing interventions for traumatic brain injury with variable success," stated Ciccia.

Most intervention has focused on changing behaviors. She added that "if we can understand how adolescents comprehend information by looking at how the brain processes it, then we may be able to create interventions that are more effective in changing behavior."

She continued, "We now have new technology such as the fMRI available to look at what the brain is doing when teens are in social situations."

Brain injuries are a major threat to teens. Currently, 5.3 million Americans are living with the effects of a traumatic brain injury, with adolescents suffering a brain injury most frequently. The effects can range from a mild concussion to a life-changing event that requires lifelong care in a residential facility. But for the group between the extremes, fitting back into their peer groups, schools and family situations can be challenging.

Most teens receive their injuries from auto accidents that tend to injure either the frontal lobe of the brain used for self control, moral judgments and abstract thoughts or the temporal lobes where comprehension of the language and word meanings takes place, said Ciccia.

Recovering social language skills is an important hurdle that teens with brain-injuries have to overcome. Many have trouble making the leap, Ciccia added, and find themselves in a downward spiral of losing friends because of inappropriate communication skills such as touching or laughing at the wrong times or lack of understanding teen talk.

Ciccia will gather fMRI images on 10 average adolescents between the ages of 18-21 as they watch videos of young people interacting with each other and answer questions in an effort to understand how the brain is comprehending social cues.. Ciccia will observe what parts of the brain fires while watching those videos.

"It is important to look at brains of typically developing adolescents during these social task because the brain is still developing. We cannot use functional imaging data from normal adults as a comparison group for teens with traumatic brain injury," stated Ciccia.

She will use fMRI equipment in the Department of Radiology at the Cleveland Clinic. FMRI will record the blood oxygen levels in the active parts of the brain during social communication situations. Where activity takes place, the fMRI appears in color, while unused parts of the brain appear grey . The images will enable the researchers to gather information about how the brain works for adolescents during communication.

Because activation patterns are generally robust, the sample can be small Information from this study is the first step in future works of helping teens living with brain-injuries, said Ciccia, who received her doctoral degree in communication sciences from Case in 2003. This new study builds on research she began with her dissertation, "The Frontal Lobe: The Neural Mechanism of Social Cognition in Typically Developing Adolescents."

About Case Western Reserve University

Case is among the nation's leading research institutions. Founded in 1826 and shaped by the unique merger of the Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University, Case is distinguished by its strengths in education, research, and service. Located in Cleveland, Case offers nationally recognized programs in the Arts and Sciences, Dentistry, Engineering, Law, Management, Medicine, Nursing, and Social Sciences. http://www.case.edu.

 

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