Naznin Virji-Babul

University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Physical Therapy

Objective: Sport-related concussion presents significant diagnostic and monitoring challenges, especially in youth populations. This study investigates the potential of EEG microstate analysis as a tool for assessing acute-phase brain activity changes in adolescent male athletes following a concussion. We analyzed resting-state EEG data from 32 par...

Objective: Youth male athletes show changes in resting-state causal brain connectivity following subacute concussion; however, little is known about how concussion alters causal brain connectivity in female youth. In this study, we compared resting-state causal brain connectivity in healthy and subconcussed females. Materials and methods: Data from...

Objective: Chemotherapy-related cognitive changes following breast cancer are commonly reported; however, changes in brain dynamics of large-scale neural networks remain unclear. Using data from the Aerobic exercise and CogniTIVe functioning in women with breAsT cancEr (ACTIVATE) trial, we conducted exploratory analyses to compare self-reported and...

Background Ovarian hormones exert direct and indirect influences on the brain; however, little is known about how these hormones impact causal brain connectivity. Studying the female brain at a single time point may be confounded by distinct hormone phases. Despite this, the menstrual cycle is often overlooked. The primary objective of this pilot s...

Complex motor skills can be acquired while observing a model without physical practice. Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) applied to the primary motor cortex (M1) also facilitates motor learning. However, the effectiveness of observational practice for bimanual coordination skills is debated. We compared the behavioural and brain causa...

Objective Blink-related oscillations (BRO) are newly discovered brainwave markers that correspond to information processing after blinking, and engage key brain regions previously shown to be implicated in subconcussive impacts. This study utilized BRO responses to evaluate brain function differences in varsity athletes with and without subconcussi...

Objective To develop a clinically feasible, brain-based tool for sideline concussion classification. Design Prospective cohort study. Setting High school athletes. Participants 35 healthy control male athletes; 23 male athletes with concussion. Interventions (or Assessment of Risk Factors) N/A Outcome Measures (1) Clinical assessment of concus...

There is growing concern that repetitive soccer headers may have negative long-term consequences on brain health. However, inconsistent and low-quality heading exposure measurements limit past investigations of this effect. Here we conducted a comprehensive heading exposure analysis across all players on a university women’s soccer team for over tw...

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a common neuroimaging technique used in clinical, research, and consumer technology given its noninvasiveness, high temporal resolution, and sensitivity. The main challenge in ambulatory EEG monitoring is the presence of substantial motion artifacts, especially for high-intensity movements such as running. This study...

Complex motor skills can be acquired while observing a model without physical practice. Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) applied to the primary motor cortex (M1) also facilitates motor learning. However, the effectiveness of observational practice for bimanual coordination skills is debated and there is little research on the effects...

Introduction Repetitive subconcussive head impacts can lead to subtle neural changes and functional consequences on brain health. However, the objective assessment of these changes remains limited. Resting state blink-related oscillations (BROs), recently discovered neurological responses following spontaneous blinking, are explored in this study t...

Social rejection is a common experience in the life of young adults. Electroencephalographic (EEG) such as N1, P1 and P3 amplitude has been linked to experiencing social rejection; it remains unclear, whether these components are also influenced by the perspective, e.g., feedback directed to oneself or another person. We used EEG to investigate bra...

Soccer is a unique sport where players purposefully and voluntarily use their unprotected heads to manipulate the direction of the ball. There are limited soccer head impact exposure data to further study brain injury risks. The objective of the current study was to combine validated mouthpiece sensors with comprehensive video analysis methods to c...

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are showing increasing promise as decision support tools in medicine and particularly in neuroscience and neuroimaging. Recently, there has been increasing work on using neural networks to classify individuals with concussion using electroencephalography (EEG) data. However, to date the need for research grade equi...

Chronic gray matter (GM) atrophy is a known consequence of moderate and severe traumatic brain injuries but has not been consistently shown in mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). The aim of this study was to investigate the longitudinal effect of uncomplicated mTBI on the brain's GM and white matter (WM) from 6 weeks to 12 months after injury. Voxe...

Concussion is a global health concern. Despite its high prevalence, a sound understanding of the mechanisms underlying this type of diffuse brain injury remains elusive. It is, however, well established that concussions cause significant functional deficits; that children and youths are disproportionately affected and have longer recovery time than...

Emotion perception is critical for infant’s social development. Mother’s mood during pregnancy has been associated with infants’ emotional developmental risks. Graphtheory analysis was applied on EEG data recorded from 35, 8-to-10-month-old-infants prenatally exposed to high or low depressed symptoms, while viewing happy and sad faces. We found an...

The diffuse and continually evolving secondary changes after mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) make it challenging to assess alterations in brain-behaviour relationships. In this study we used myelin water imaging to evaluate changes in myelin water fraction (MWF) in individuals with chronic mTBI and persistent symptoms and measured their cognitiv...

Concussion is a global health concern. Despite its high prevalence, a sound understanding of the mechanisms underlying this type of diffuse brain injury remains elusive. It is, however, well established that concussions cause significant functional deficits; that children and youths are disproportionately affected and have longer recovery time than...

While the use of pharmaceuticals for neuroenhancement in adults has dominated the academic literature, the ethics of emerging neurotechnologies, such as non-invasive brain stimulation is just beginning to be explored. In particular, very little is known about the effects and issues related to the use of brain stimulation in healthy adolescents. Ado...

The increased incidence of reported traumatic brain injury (TBI) and its potentially serious long-term consequences have enormous clinical and societal impacts. The diffuse and continually evolving secondary changes after TBI make it challenging to evaluate the changes in brain-behaviour relationships. In this study we used myelin water imaging to...

Children and youths are at a greater risk of concussions than adults, and once injured, take longer to recover. A key feature of concussion is an increase in functional connectivity, yet it remains unclear how changes in functional connectivity relate to the patterns of information flow within resting state networks following concussion and how the...

Objectives: The primary purpose of this study was to examine vestibular/ocular motor screening (VOMS) test performance in a sample of healthy youth ice hockey players. A particular focus was to investigate the potential effects of age and pre-existing health conditions, including concussion history, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),...

Children and youth are at a greater risk of concussions than adults, and once injured, take longer to recover. A key feature of concussion is a diffuse increase in functional connectivity; yet it remains unclear how changes in functional connectivity relate to the patterns of information flow within resting state networks following concussion and h...

Background Prenatal maternal depression (PMD) and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are associated with increased developmental risk in infants. Reports suggest that PMD is associated with hyperconnectivity of the insula and the amygdala, while SSRI exposure is associated with hyperconnectivity of the auditory network in...

Quantifying the brain's effective connectivity offers a unique window onto the causal architecture coupling the different regions of the brain. Here, we advocate a new, data-driven measure of directed (or effective) brain connectivity based on the recently developed information flow rate coefficient. The concept of the information flow rate is foun...

We investigated whether the combination of tDCS and observational learning modulates mu suppression and learning of a novel motor task. 19 healthy participants were randomly assigned, to either anodal stimulation (n=9) or sham stimulation (n=10). The anodal electrode was placed over the left premotor cortex and the cathodal electrode was placed ove...

Objectives: To examine the neurophysiological correlates and brain network organization underlying physical and cognitive exertion in active young adults. Design: Repeated measures. Methods: Thirteen healthy adults completed three exertion tasks in a counterbalanced order: a graded working memory task (anti-saccade and serial addition task (AS...

Background: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are commonly used to treat depression during pregnancy. SSRIs cross the placenta, inhibit serotonin reuptake, and thereby are thought to alter central fetal serotonin signaling. Both prenatal maternal mood disturbances and in utero SSRI exposure have been associated with altered fetal and...

Background and purpose: Concussion is a major public health concern and one of the least understood neurological injuries. Children and youth are disproportionally affected by concussion, and once injured, take longer to recover. Current guidelines recommend a period of physical and cognitive rest with a gradual progressive return to activity. Alt...

Research has shown the effectiveness of observational practice for motor learning, but there continues to be debate about the mechanisms underlying effectiveness. Although cortical processes can be moderated during observation, after both physical and observational practice, how these processes change with respect to behavioural measures of learnin...

Sports-related concussion in youth is a major public health issue. Evaluating the diffuse and often subtle changes in structure and function that occur in the brain, particularly in this population, remains a significant challenge. The goal of this pilot study was to evaluate the relationship between the intrinsic dynamics of the brain using restin...

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to report baseline, preseason data for the Child-SCAT3, stratified by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) status, and examine group differences in Child-SCAT3 performance between children with and without ADHD. Design: Cross-sectional study. Methods: Young male hockey players (n = 304),...

Facilitating functional recovery following brain injury is a key goal of neurorehabilitation. Direct, objective measures of changes in the brain are critical to understanding how and when meaningful changes occur, however, assessing neuroplasticity using brain based results remains a significant challenge. Little is known about the underlying chang...

An infant’s ability to perceive emotional facial expressions is critical for developing social skills. Infants are tuned to faces from early in life, however the functional organization of the brain that supports the processing of emotional faces in infants is still not well understood. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) brain responses in 8-...

Objective: In this paper, we describe the development of a novel tool—the Sports Organization Concussion Risk Assessment Tool (SOCRAT)—to assist sport organizations in assessing the overall risk of concussion at a team level by identifying key risk factors. Methods: We first conducted a literature review to identify risk factors of concussion using...

Purpose: This cross-sectional, observational study investigated whether physical activity (PA) levels are associated with motor performance and physical function in children after treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Method: Participants aged 8-13 years who had completed treatment for ALL (3-36 months post-treatment) were tested at th...

Here, we investigated EEG-based source-level spectral differences between adolescents with sports-related concussions and healthy age matched controls. We transformed resting state EEG collected in both groups to the source domain using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and computed the component process power spectra. For group-level analysis i...

Background Children and youth are at increased risk of sustaining sport-related concussions. There is a need to develop age-specific tools to evaluate the effects of concussion. The objective of this study was to determine normative values for the Child Sport Concussion Assessment Tool (Child SCAT3) in child athletes and evaluate the symptom scorin...

Clinicians recognize that client motivation is key to optimizing rehabilitation; however, they are limited in its assessment by a paucity of motivation measures. This paper presents the preliminary psychometrics of the Pediatric Motivation Scale (PMOT) designed to measure motivation from a child's perspective. Content validity of the PMOT was measu...

The application of technologies, such as video gaming and social media for rehabilitation, is garnering interest in the medical field. However, little research has examined clinicians' perspectives regarding technology adoption by their clients. The objective of our study was to explore therapists' perceptions of how young people and adults with he...

Background: Digital technology is becoming an increasingly popular means of delivering meaningful therapy to individuals with neurological impairments. An understanding of clients' technology use and their perspectives on incorporating technology into rehabilitation can provide researchers and designers with valuable information to inform developm...

Background. Clinicians recognize that client motivation is key to optimizing rehabilitation; however, they are limited in its assessment by a paucity of motivation measures. Purpose. This paper presents the preliminary psychometrics of the Pediatric Motivation Scale (PMOT) designed to measure motivation from a child’s perspective. Method. Conten...

Sports related concussion in adolescents is a major public health issue; however, little is known about the underlying changes in functional brain connectivity. We evaluated connectivity of resting state brain networks to determine whether alterations in specific networks distinguish adolescents with sports related concussion from a group of health...

Sports related concussion is a major public health issue, however little is known about the underlying changes in functional brain networks in adolescents following injury. Our aim was to use the tools from graph theory to evaluate the changes in brain network properties following concussion in adolescent athletes. We recorded resting state electro...

The functional networks that support action observation are of great interest in understanding the development of social cognition and motor learning. How infants learn to represent and understand the world around them remains one of the most intriguing questions in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Recently, mathematical measures derived from...

Primary objective: To systematically review the evidence of the effects of motivating rehabilitation interventions on outcomes in children with acquired brain injury (ABI). Methods: A literature search of six databases was conducted to identify intervention studies published until July 2013. The American Academy for Cerebral Palsy and Developmen...

The presence of an extra whole or part of chromosome 21 in people with Down syndrome (DS) is associated with multiple neurological changes, including pathological aging that often meets the criteria for Alzheimer's Disease (AD). In addition, trisomies have been shown to disrupt normal epigenetic marks across the genome, perhaps in response to chang...

In this article, we present a new variational Bayes approach for solving the neuroelectromagnetic inverse problem arising in studies involving electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). This high-dimensional spatiotemporal estimation problem involves the recovery of time-varying neural activity at a large number of locations wit...

Objectives To establish the short-term changes in white matter integrity following sport related concussion in adolescents and to examine the association between changes in white matter integrity and a clinical measure of concussion. Design Cross-sectional within cohort study. Setting University hospital and community ice hockey arenas. Subjects Tw...

This study reviewed evidence regarding the effect of motivational rehabilitation interventions on outcomes in children with cerebral palsy. Six databases were searched for literature published up to May 2012. Included studies measured the purported motivating effects of motor-based rehabilitation interventions and the measured impact on outcomes. T...

We have previously shown that sports related concussion in adolescents is associated with changes in whole brain properties of white matter pathways. We now assess local changes within these pathways. Twelve adolescents with a clinical diagnosis of subacute concussion and ten healthy adolescents matched for age, gender and physical activity complet...

Neurophysiological evidence suggests that a specialized cortical network is involved in the visual perception of biological motion; however, the temporal dynamics underlying this network is largely unexplored. We used magnetoencephalography to determine the spatial distribution and task-related temporal dynamics of the oscillatory activity of rando...

It is known that in many neurological disorders such as Down syndrome, main brain rhythms shift their frequencies slightly, and characterizing the spatial distribution of these shifts is of interest. This article reports on the development of a Skew-t mixed model for the spatial analysis of resting state brain activity in healthy controls and indiv...

Mirror neurons are recognized as a crucial aspect of motor and social learning yet we know little about their origins and development. Two competing hypotheses are highlighted in the literature. One suggests that mirror neurons may be innate and are an adaptation for action understanding. The alternative, proposes that mirror neurons develop throug...

Research on facial expressions in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) has been conducted using photographs. Our goal was to examine the effect of motion on perception of emotional expressions. Adults with DS, adults with typical development matched for chronological age (CA), and children with typical development matched for developmental age (DA)...

Introduction In the first year of life, typically developing infants make huge strides in motor development. They progress from a limited repertoire of spontaneous and reflex movements to more purposeful, goal-directed movements. Using their arms, they achieve greater balance in more upright positions and progress from sitting and crawling to stand...

This paper reports on the computer vision-based analysis of weight-shifting patterns in Down Syndrome subjects. The subjects were filmed while playing a snowboarding game in a virtual reality environment. To capture local changes in posture during motion performance, we introduce the concept of parabolic bounding box. This concept aims at capturing...

Individuals with Down syndrome have well known cognitive and sensorimotor impairments, however, the underlying neural processes are poorly understood. The objective of this study was to investigate the underlying spatial localization and functional connectivity during voluntary movements of the right index finger. Adults with Down syndrome and heal...

Measuring the perception of friendship in adults with Down syndrome (DS) has long been a research challenge. While there have been studies investigating the number of friends children with DS have in, the study of how adults with DS view the concept of friendship has been relatively unexplored. The aim of this study was to evaluate the perception o...

Results of a magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain imaging study conducted to examine the cortical responses during action execution and action observation in 10 healthy adults and 8 age-matched adults with Down syndrome are reported. During execution, the motor responses were strongly lateralized on the ipsilateral rather than the contralateral side...

In this study, we investigated the neural responses during the perception of stationary dots, randomly moving point light dots and point light dots representing human motion. We recorded cortical responses from ten right handed subjects with a 151 channel whole head MEG system (VSM MedTech, Coquitlam, BC). For each subject a three-dimensional spati...

Research in pediatric central nervous system pathophysiology is focused around three primary goals: identification of neurodevelopmental disorders, understanding the differences in brain development which underlie these disorders, and improving treatment for these young children. Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are a complex set of disorders which...

We previously reported that in a small group of right handed adults with Down syndrome (DS), voluntary finger movements were characterized by ipsilateral dominance. The aim of this study was to examine the dynamics of network connectivity during the same motion. Thirteen typical adults and twelve adults with DS participated in this study. Cortical...

The motor development of individuals with Down syndrome has traditionally focused on identifying strengths and weaknesses in relation to typical developmental milestones. In this chapter, we consider motor behavior from the context of a multifaceted interaction between action, and the physical and social environment. We review recent findings from...

Speed-accuracy trade-offs in persons with Down syndrome and typically developing controls were tested with a Fitts' task. Movement time scaled linearly with index of difficulty in both groups, and there were no accuracy differences. Persons with Down syndrome were slower than typically developing individuals. Regression analysis on movement time an...

Many physiotherapeutic models of management are widely accepted on the basis of empirical observations. General principles of treatment are then incorporated into therapists′ personal models. In order to encourage physiotherapists to re-evaluate their individual approach, I have critically analysed my individual approach to the treatment of hearing...

How humans understand the actions and intentions of others remains poorly understood. Here we report the results of a magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment to determine the temporal dynamics and spatial distribution of brain regions activated during execution and observation of a reach to grasp motion using real world stimuli. We show that althou...