Yelena Bodien, PhD, a clinical neuroscientist with expertise in brain disorders related to coma, consciousness and traumatic brain injury (TBI) has joined Vanderbilt University Medical Center as an investigator in the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship (CIBS) Center and assistant professor in the Division of Acute Care Surgery in the Department of Surgery.
Bodien will co-direct the CIBS Center’s Neuroimaging Core and its interface with the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science on a number of active, federally funded studies. She has secondary appointments as an assistant professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and the Department of Neurological Surgery.
“Dr. Bodien represents a wonderful addition to a powerful nucleus of TBI work being done nationally and internationally, with key contributions from VUMC and our CIBS Center,” said Mayur Patel, MD, MPH, chief of the Division of Acute Care Surgery. “We’re thrilled to see her magnify the momentum in this high-priority area of neurosciences and disorders of consciousness.”
The CIBS Center is composed of a multidisciplinary, collaborative group of physicians, nurses, psychologists, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, pharmacists, physical and occupational therapists and trainees. The center’s team works with patients with TBI and patients who are, or have been, critically ill and have suffered from disorders of consciousness, like coma and delirium. These patients are at risk for long-term cognitive, functional and neuropsychological impairments. CIBS Center research seeks to better understand these brain injuries and improve treatment and outcomes.
Previously, Bodien was an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She served as associate director of the Laboratory for Neuroimaging of Coma and Consciousness, and as a research scientist in the Spaulding Neurorehabilitation Lab. Bodien received a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“VUMC, and specifically the CIBS Center, has a national and international reputation for conducting brain injury research at the highest level of rigor and with a strong emphasis on clinical translation,” said Bodien. “I look forward to expanding disorders of consciousness research here, leveraging the well-established infrastructure for acute and long-term data collection across settings, and advancing evidence-based clinical care for patients with the most severe brain injuries.”
In her research, Bodien has applied standardized behavioral measures and advanced neuroimaging to improve the precision of the diagnosis and prognosis of severe brain injury. She is especially interested in understanding recovery from disorders of consciousness. Disorders of consciousness are health conditions associated with impaired consciousness such as coma, vegetative state and minimally conscious state.
Bodien is active in several national and international initiatives to advance knowledge about brain disorders to improve patient care. She co-chairs the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine Brain Injury Special Interest Group Disorders of Consciousness Task Force and the Neurocritical Care Society’s Curing Coma Campaign Prospective Studies workgroup. She also led the Curing Coma Campaign Outcomes and Endpoints Common Data Elements workgroup whose recommendations were recently published in the journal Neurocritical Care.
For more than a decade, Bodien has been an investigator and Outcomes Core member for the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in TBI (TRACK-TBI) study, a multicenter, observational investigation sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. The goal of the TRACK-TBI study is to determine the relationships among the clinical, neuroimaging, cognitive, genetic and proteomic biomarker characteristics for the entire spectrum of TBI.
Most recently, Bodien was part of a TRACK-TBI team that raised important questions about waiting longer than 72 hours before withdrawing life support from patients with severe TBI. The study, which drew significant media attention, suggested that up to 42% of TBI survivors who had life support withdrawn may have recovered some degree of independence in the next six months had life support been continued.
Bodien is the first author of a study published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine that shows approximately 1 in 4 study participants with severe brain injury who did not have an observable response to commands performed a cognitive task which was detected by functional MRI or electroencephalogram (EEG).
Bodien also served as site principal investigator and Outcomes Core lead for the Curing Coma Campaign ACute cOma PragMatic Prospective ObSErvational (COMPOSE) Study. The COMPOSE Study is a global public health initiative of the Neurocritical Care Society with the goal of developing and implementing innovative coma treatment strategies.
Notably, Bodien served as the Spaulding-Harvard TBI Model Systems (TBIMS) site-specific principal investigator a project that developed and validated an abbreviated, standardized behavioral assessment of consciousness in the ICU. TBIMS is an initiative of the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, the U.S. government’s primary disability research organization.
She is now the principal investigator for a site-specific project which seeks to understand patient and caregiver perspectives on meaningful outcomes after severe TBI, and this work will continue in her new role at VUMC.