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: Michael
Age: 11
Diagnoses: Suffered a stroke while playing a sport at age 10

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

Through our comprehensive evaluations, including a qEEG brain map, we identified and measured where communication flow was lacking in Michael'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 his brain, Michael's team worked with him on his individualized model of care. This included specific activities to normalize these connections. His 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 the perseverative cycle

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

- Michael's Parents

Michael's Program and Functional Gains

Michael's individualized plan included activities designed to help him overcome anxiety and patterns of negative self-perception and self-talk as he worked to rebuild his physical and mental abilities. With his teacher implementing his care plan with Hope, Truth, and Love, Michael began seeing positive results of her efforts and gradually turned his self-critic into a champion. Daily behavioral measurements noted reduced perseveration, negative comparisons, and rote dialogue. He 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

Michael's Brain Improvement

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

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

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

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

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