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Cross-Cutting
Geriatric Rehabilitation
Neurodegenerative Disease (e.g. MS, Parkinson's disease)
Special Symposium
Andrei Irimia, PhD
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF GERONTOLOGY AND NEUROSCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES, California
Patricia Heyn, PhD, FGSA, FACRM
Associate Professor
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Aurora, Colorado
Emily Nalder, PhD, BOccThy(Hons)
Assistant professor (tenure stream)
University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine
Toronto, Ontario
The rehabilitation of patients with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, and stroke poses substantial challenges due to these conditions’ heterogeneous patterns of neural degradation. This special symposium has the goal to customize therapies based on patient-specific disability profiles. Professionals can benefit from mapping neural/cognitive deficits onto individualized pattern of brain wiring disruptions. Recent progress on integrating structural and diffusion MRI with connectome mapping techniques affords us the unique opportunity to conceptualize neural disability as a dynamic process of brain connectivity alterations whose trajectory can be modified with rehabilitation with the to optimize recovery.