BADER Consortium: Core Capabilities/Team Building Support

Over the past four years, the Biomechanics Lab at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) has initiated a very productive collaboration with Dr. Bazrgari at University of Kentucky. The long-term goal of this collaboration – aligned with the missions of both the Extremity Trauma and Amputation Center of Excellence (EACE) and Bridging Advanced Development for Exceptional Rehabilitation (BADER) Consortium – is to enhance the clinical outcomes of Service Members with extremity trauma and limb loss, specifically those who suffer from debilitating secondary health complications such as low back pain. To date, we have been able to leverage the computational capabilities (e.g., finite element modeling) developed in Dr. Bazrgari’s lab for in-depth biomechanical analyses of the experimental data we have been collecting from Service Members with extremity trauma and limb loss over the past 15 years. The initiation of this collaboration was made possible by two grants, one from DoD (PI, Hendershot) and another from NIH (PI, Bazrgari); collectively, these efforts have thus far resulted in numerous journal publications in field-leading journals and conference presentations at prestigious scientific meetings. Given challenges and difficulties associated with building successful collaborative research teams, particularly teams that connect resources and expertise from multiple institutions, we strongly believe that preservation of a successfully established collaboration of such a nature is equally, if not more, important as initiation of new ones. Therefore, the objective of this project is to sustain, strengthen, and expand this collaboration, thereby enabling us to more rapidly achieve our ultimate goal. Specifically, the financial support from this grant will offer a period of intensive research to Dr. Bazrgari during which we will develop new proposals on the solid research foundation we have developed over the past four years. The support from this grant will also be implemented toward dissemination of our research via publication and conference presentation. The expertise of Dr. Bazrgari in the biomechanics of the human musculoskeletal system focuses on spine and low back disorders. His research methods on the biomechanics of the human spine involve both computational and experimental studies and have been supported by funds from NIOSH, DoD, and NIH and have resulted in 44 journal and >80 conference publications thus far. The proposed activities in this project are aimed at maximizing the application of research methods developed in Dr. Bazrgari’s lab in our research related to clinical management of low back pain among Service Members with unilateral lower limb amputation. During this project, we will work on two proposals on the foundation that have been established in our recent works. One of these proposals will focus on the association of measures obtained from our combined experimental and computational methods with clinical presentation of low back pain in Service Members with extremity trauma. The other one will have a focus on the impact of select movement correction interventions on lower back biomechanics in the same cohort. We will target DoD’s and VA’s funding opportunities for the first proposal whereas for the second proposal we will target NIH funding opportunities. We will also continue our efforts toward dissemination of our research findings via journal publication and conference presentations. Specifically, one set of these research findings are related to a preliminary longitudinal study wherein we have estimated spinal loads during walking and during an unstable sitting task. The other set is related to our ongoing calculations of risk of fatigue failure of intervertebral disc in Service Members with unilateral lower limb amputation.