Specificities of Rehabilitative Treatments of Brain Disorders：A Survey Using Statistical Analysis of Textual Data from Annual Meeting Abstracts

Abstract

Objective：Brain disorders are major concerns in rehabilitation medicine in Japan. Of the various categories of brain disorders, rehabilitative treatments for strokes, traumatic brain injuries, and neurodegenerative diseases are different. This study aimed to demonstrate the specificities of the rehabilitative treatments for these three subcategories after statistical analysis of textual data from abstracts indexed during an annual meeting for rehabilitation medicine.

Materials and Methods：Abstracts indexed during the 56^th annual meeting of the Japanese Association of Rehabilitation Medicine in 2019 were entered into the analytical database. Words associated with each subcategory were extracted using Jaccard's similarity coefficients.

Results：The analysies showed that the words strongly associated with strokes were “paresis,” “convalescent,” “admission,” “onset,” “ward,” “function,” “FIM,” “impairment,” “improvement,” and “discharge” (extracted from 402 abstracts；coefficients ranged from 0.36 to 0.23). In parallel, the words such as “trauma,” “traffic,” “higher,” “accident,” “fall,” “brain,” “labor,” “brain-disease,” “hematoma,” and “facility” were related to traumatic brain injuries (extracted from 36 abstracts；coefficients ranged from 0.15 to 0.08). The words strongly associated with neurodegenerative diseases were “cognition,” “MMSE,” “elderly,” “care,” “home,” “nursing home,” “fracture,” “impairment,” “Yahr,” and “disease” (extracted from 96 abstracts；coefficients ranged from 0.18 to 0.09).

Conclusions：The specifics of rehabilitative treatments for strokes, traumatic brain injuries, and neurodegenerative diseases were successfully outlined after the analysies of the textual data. This technique may be useful for evaluating information provided in textual forms, such as abstracts of conferences.