The document discusses rehabilitation and training for patients who have experienced stroke, head trauma, or epilepsy. Holistic neuropsychological rehabilitation is recommended to reduce disability following these events. Rehabilitation is a long process that aims to restructure patients both mentally and socially to support family reintegration. The symptoms of head trauma can vary and may not appear immediately, potentially emerging hours or weeks later. Rehabilitation addresses medical, social, and family needs to support psychosocial reintegration based on a patient's cognitive abilities and skills.

1. REHABILITATION AND TRAINING
Holistic neuropsychological rehabilitation is recommended in post-acute rehabilitation
to reduce functional disability in patients following stroke or head trauma. This is an
area in which disability comes into play, obviously it depends on case to case, but even
after rehabilitation often subjects who suffer certain traumas, especially if important,
do not always manage to recover 100%: It is necessary to restructure the subject both
in terms of strategies and in terms of his own self, as regards the relational world. In
this condition the family component also comes into play, because it is not a loss of
self only by the one/the one who has suffered the trauma, but it is a loss that also
concerns the family members, since they too lose what was the subject before the
eventual accident. Head trauma is a condition that should not be underestimated. In
fact, it is not necessarily that the symptoms or any damage resulting from the trauma
in question are manifested immediately; on the contrary, in some cases they could
appear even after hours, or even weeks after the damage happened. From a medical
point of view, "head trauma" is defined as any damage to the skull and/or the brain and
its casings, caused by a physical event of a mechanical type (such as, for example, a
fall in which the head is hit on the ground). The most common, for example, are road
accidents or even domestic accidents. The head injury is responsible for 50% of all
traumatic deaths and 2% of all deaths, because clearly the most serious ones can lead
to death. Distinguiamo: traumi cranici lievi; moderate or severe head trauma. The
symptomatology of head injury may be different depending on the extent of the damage
and depending on the area of the brain - or brain areas - affected by the latter. However,
among the main symptoms that can be manifested in case of mild head trauma, we
remember: short-term loss of consciousness; however, it should be noted that this
symptom does not always manifest itself; slight mental confusion; headache; dizziness;
vision disorders; concentration difficulty.
In the case of moderate or severe head trauma, the above mentioned symptoms may
manifest themselves in a more marked and intense way. In addition, in the long term
they may manifest themselves: amnesia; disturbi comportamentali; disturbances of the
circadian rhythm; impairment of intellectual abilities; speech disorders; motor
disturbance. The appearance of seizures is also possible or even coma, but this does
not occur in all cases.
Rehabilitation can be a very long and varied path depending on the severity of the
damage. It is not only medical interventions that seek to stabilize the patient, but also
social and family reintegration interventions.

2. Let’s set a targeted example. Mauro is an 18-year-old with ECT, complicated after a
year and a half from epilepsy. The description of the clinical case follows three phases
of evaluation, from hospitalization to inclusion in the socio-scholastic context (3-5-18
months post-TCE) and the following procedure: narration of the patient and/or the
family member, discussion of clinical data deriving from the cognitive profile and
quality of life and presentation of clinical work in cognitive behavioral rehabilitation.
The psychological themes that emerged are: the memory of the traumatic event and the
hospitalization, the enthusiasm of the "return to life", the fatigue and the suffering of
"being different".
This example explains in a simple way the path of evaluation and treatment of patients
with TCE started during admission and continued on the territory, for the care of the
patient in order to obtain a psychosocial reintegration appropriate to cognitive
resources and residual behavioural skills.
The course "Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life" of the
University of Chicago was carried out in the best of ways because it allowed us kids to
clearly and easily acquire all the topics covered, even the most complex ones and
personally allowed me to improve my knowledge in the field of neuroscience and
neurobiology. Moreover, the most important thing was to be able to put into practice
what we had learned through the use of the exercises carried out simultaneously and
the tests with the evaluation carried out at the end of each activity that allowed each of
us to understand if we had consolidated the information learned. Another very
instructive thing were the optional neuroanatomy laboratories that contained sensitive
graphic elements very interesting for those fascinated by this field.
SIRNA IRENE RITA