(PHILADELPHIA, PA) -- The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded Temple University Hospital's Department of Emergency Medicine a $1 million grant to participate as a primary clinical study site in the Neurological Emergencies Treatment Trials (NETT) Network.

The NETT Network initiative is designed to facilitate high-quality clinical trials in multiple types of emergency neurological disorders affecting adults or children. The NETT network will bring together 11 national sites to perform wide-scale clinical trials testing the effectiveness of new treatments for neurological emergencies, which include traumatic brain injuries, seizures, stroke, meningitis, and spinal cord injuries.

Each year, approximately 15 million adults and children visit the emergency department for acute neurological disorders. It is critical to provide optimal care during the first hours of neurological emergencies, which are mostly assessed and treated by emergency physicians.

Temple University Hospital will serve as a clinical hub for this five-year study series; and will establish Phila-NETT, which includes Temple-Episcopal, Temple University Children's Medical Center, Northeastern Hospital, and Hahnemann Hospital as additional sites. This collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort involves emergency physicians, neurologists, neurosurgeons, interventional radiologists, rehabilitation therapists, and pediatricians.

"Together, we will be a clinical network to recruit, evaluate, and treat patients with neurological emergencies," said Dr. Nina Gentile, Associate Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine, Temple University Hospital, and principal investigator of this project. "We're very excited about this grant because, in emergency medicine, we often have limited time to decide on the best way to treat patients. These studies will help us further define the right choices."

Gentile said the goals of the investigation are three-fo
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Contact: Vivica Aycox
vaycox@temple.edu
Temple University Health System
30-Jan-2007