The Sports Legacy Institute (SLI) is a non-profit organization focused on solving the concussion crisis by supporting education and research on the causes and effects of concussions and by helping to shape subsequent policy. SLI’s mission is “to advance the study, treatment, and prevention of brain trauma in athletes and other at-risk groups.” SLI is one of PAR’s valued partners, sharing our commitment to creating connections and changing lives. This month, SLI announced the launch of the California Concussion Coalition, and PAR was a proud sponsor of kick-off events in Los Angeles and Oakland. The goal of the coalition is “to provide student athletes in the community with the best-in-class resources available to protect them from concussions in sports.” Special guests at the August 20 kick-off event in LA included former NFL players Jim Brown, Michael Haynes, Jerry Simmons, and Shelby Jordan, as well as professional wrestler Rob Van Dam. Concussion prevention is very important to us at PAR, and we are delighted to be working with an organization like the SLI, which supports education and research that will help protect young athletes from serious brain injury. In terms of best-in-class resources, our concussion apps, including the award-winning CRR (for parents and coaches) and the CARE (for health care professionals), provide a simple and cost-effective way to help users quickly assess the likelihood of a concussion and take appropriate action. PAR donates 15% of the proceeds from the sale of each concussion app to support concussion research at the Children’s National Medical Center and the Matthew A. Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Have you had a chance to download one of our concussion apps? If not, click on the links above or find us at the Apple® App StoreSM or Google Play. And let us know what you think—PAR wants to hear from you, so leave a comment and join the conversation!
The Concussion Recognition & Response™: Coach and Parent Version (CRR) from PAR has been nominated for the prestigious Appy Award! One of three finalists in the medical category, the CRR is an app for mobile phones and tablets that allows parents and coaches to quickly check for the signs and symptoms of a concussion when a young athlete is injured on the playing field. The Appy Awards will be held on March 19, 2012, in San Francisco. Finalists this year include well-known apps and brands including Mint, HBO, MLB At Bat, Home Depot, The Daily, Flipboard, Telenav and Ask.com, and growing upstarts like Westfield Malls, Viggle, Wine Road, iCookBook and SlideShark. Along with PAR’s CRR, the other nominees in the medical category are drchrono, an electronic health record (EHR) platform for physicians, and WebMD, a mobile version of the popular health information Web site. Since its inception, the Appy Awards have been designed to include all devices and platforms, and finalists are carefully chosen by the Executive Jury from hundreds of thousands of eligible apps. This year’s Jury includes fifteen veterans from three industries: software development, advertising and marketing, and technology publishing. To learn more about the Appy Awards, and to view the full lineup of categories and finalists, visit http://AppyAwards.net.
PAR author David J. Schretlen, PhD, will be giving a workshop at the annual conference of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology (AACN) in Washington, D.C., on June 9, 2011. Dr Schretlen’s workshop, entitled “Threats to the Validity of Inference in Neuropsychology and Novel Methods of Practice to Help Overcome Them,” will encourage participants to consider fundamental questions about inference in clinical psychology:
Dr. Schretlen will describe three basic approaches to clinical inference (pathological signs, deficit measurement, and pattern analysis) and examine the underlying logical assumptions, implementation, strengths, and threats to the validity of each inferential method. Participants will examine the conceptualization and assessment of pathognomonic signs and cognitive deficits and will discuss the risky practice of sysgiving additional tests to clarify ambiguous findings. Dr. Schretlen will describe what it means to “calibrate” test performance for demographic characteristics and estimated premorbid ability, and how this fundamentally alters the meaning of high and low test scores. Participants will learn about the circumstances under which raw scores can be more informative than demographically calibrated scores. Finally, Dr. Schretlen will argue that symptom validity testing differs from effort testing, and he will present findings from an experiment designed to assess cognitive effort among adults with no incentive to feign impairment and no evidence of symptom exaggeration.
Dr. Schretlen is Associate Professor of Medical Psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Radiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of the Calibrated Neuropsychological Normative System™ (CNNS™) and the companion Software Portfolio (CNNS™-SP), which are designed to assist clinicians and researchers in their interpretation of the tests that make up the normative system. To learn more about how to improve the precision of neuropsychological test interpretation with the CNNS and to see a list of tests calibrated by the CNNS, visit www.parinc.com.
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