Sleep and Brain Injury

This ground-breaking book binds together a contemporary understanding of sleep and brain injury, pairing empirical understanding through clinical practice with extensive up-to-date research, to provide a deeply considered approach to these overlapping topics. Firstly, the author discusses the neuroanatomy and architecture of sleep, including the need for sleep, definitions of good sleep, and what can go wrong with sleep. The focus then moves to the neuroanatomical damage and dysfunction from brain injury, and the resultant functional effects. The author then adroitly fuses the two streams of coverage together, focusing on the neurobiological, neurochemical, and functional aspects of both sleep and brain injury to offer new insights as to how they interrelate.

The book then looks towards the applied aspects of treatment and rehabilitation, bringing further thoughts of how, because of this new understanding, we can potentially offer novel treatments for brain injury recovery and sleep problems. In this final practical part, four sleep foundations are given, necessary to optimize the three most common sleep problems and their treatments after brain injury.

This new approach highlights how sleep can affect the specific functional effects of brain injury and how brain injury can exacerbate some of the specific functional effects of sleep problems, thus having the potential to transform the field of neurorehabilitation. It is essential reading for professionals working with brain injury and postgraduate students in clinical neuropsychology.

Crawford M. Thomas has been in healthcare and academe for over 30 years. He has designed, implemented, and led inpatient and community acquired brain injury neurorehabilitation services. A skilled Consultant Clinical Neuropsychologist and Neuroscientist, he is the clinical lead of one of the largest community acquired brain injury teams in the UK, working for Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.