Success Stories:
Brain Injury & Stroke

Program Integration

Our Neurodevelopmental team is dedicated to set our students and their families up for success. We integrate program elements across all aspects of a student's life for consistency and maximum progress, from school to activities to home.

Brain Injury & Stroke

Student Name: Emily
Age: 14
Diagnoses: Suffered a stroke while playing a sport at age 12

Functional Challenges: Emily entered Jacob's Ladder with complete loss of verbal language and language comprehension. She lost all academic ability, although she had been an advanced placement student previously. She experienced mobility and gait challenges and had limited use of her right hand.

Through our comprehensive evaluations, including a qEEG brain map, we identified and measured where communication flow was lacking in Emily's brain (hypo coherence) or where communication flow was locked and/or was overly used (hyper coherence).

Focusing on the top 10 overactive and top 10 underactive regions of her brain, Emily’s team worked with her on her individualized model of care. This included specific activities to normalize these connections. Her plan was developed to achieve these goals:

Goal #1: Focus on personal strengths, practice self-affirmation and mindfulness

Goal #2: Concentrate on the present to maintain a healthy state

Goal #3: Assess situations and express appropriate emotions/body language/dialogue rather than enter into perseverative cycle

"It was so integrated – every need she had they could address but they weren’t addressing it in a silo. It was an integrated plan where she would be going through her day learning and playing and all these things are happening and she isn’t even aware of it.”

- Emily's Parents

Emily's Program and Functional Gains

Emily’s individualized plan included activities designed to help her overcome anxiety and patterns of negative self-perception and self-talk as she worked to rebuild her physical and mental abilities. With her teacher implementing her care plan with Hope, Truth, and Love, Emily began seeing positive results of her efforts and gradually turned her self-critic into a champion. Daily behavioral measurements noted reduced perseveration, negative comparisons, and rote dialogue. She experienced large academic and physical gains over the course of eight months.

Starting at Jacob's Ladder

Loss of all verbal language output
Loss of language comprehension
Mobility and gait challenges with limited use of right hand
Loss of all academic ability after having been an advanced placement student

September 2019

Employs self-referencing and perspective-taking to appropriately advocate for needs
Frequently participates in social gatherings and has a large social network
Increased complexity of his own thoughts, allowing for higher academic output and more complex language ability

Emily's Brain Improvement

Our Interpersonal Whole-Brain Model of Care achieves transformational outcomes that students and families experience in daily life. Emily made huge strides in communication, physiology, and academics. Below are examples of her neural connections improvements as shown through qEEG measurements.

Communication flow within Emily's Broca's Area located in her Inferior Frontal/Prefrontal Cortex was lacking by -7.64 standard deviations from a normalized connection.

Through Emily's individualized model of care, activities were implemented that improved her communication flow to -1.89 standard deviations from a normalized connection.

Communication flow between Emily's Temporal Lobe and Anterior Cingulate Gyrus was locked and/or overly-used by +7.38 standard deviations from a normalized connection.

Through Emily's individualized model of care, activities were implemented that improved her communication flow to +0.44 standard deviations from a normalized connection.