Brain training shows promise as a treatment for veterans’ cognitive problems after TBI
A Pentagon-funded study found that a form of computer-based brain training can improve cognitive performance in vets after a traumatic brain injury.
It has been 27 years since an attack on a U.S. military convoy in the Middle East left Army reservist Melissa Dengan, now 63, with such serious head trauma that she was unconscious for five days. “I woke up back in the United States, and didn’t know how I got there,” she said. “I was pretty muddled for a while.”
“A while” turned into decades. A captain when she left active duty, Dengan eventually returned to school for a nursing degree. But bouts of overwhelming depression, anxiety, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress left her struggling to concentrate, remember, and learn. Group therapy helped with some of the psychiatric symptoms, but nothing worked for the cognitive ones. On
