Overview of Cochrane Systematic Reviews of Rehabilitation Interventions for Persons with Traumatic Brain Injury: A Mapping Synthesis

Background: The World Health Organization has identified an unmet global need for rehabilitation interventions concerning 20 non-communicable diseases, traumatic brain injury included. This overview compiles and synthesizes the quality and quantity of available evidence on the effectiveness of rehabilitation interventions for traumatic brain injury from Cochrane systematic reviews (CSRs). The results will be used to develop the Package of Interventions for Rehabilitation. Methods: All CSRs on TBI tagged in the Cochrane Rehabilitation database published between August 2009 and September 2021 were included. Evidence mapping was implemented to extract study characteristics and evidence from the CSRs. Results: Six CSRs (42 studies; n = 3983) examined the effectiveness of either non-pharmacological or pharmacological interventions after TBI. Among 19 comparisons, 3% were rated as high in quality of evidence, 9% moderate, 54% low, and 34% very low. Non-pharmacological interventions with moderate quality, hospital-based cognitive rehabilitation and cognitive didactic therapy, likely produced minimal to no changes in the return-to-work rate. Anti-epileptic drugs and neuroprotective agents resulted in a minimal difference to the frequency of late seizure episodes in post-traumatic epilepsy. Conclusions: No prominent advances in treatment options were reported in any of the CSRs. The high rate of low and very low quality of evidence makes it difficult to ascertain the effectiveness of several recommended non-pharmacological interventions.