ISCN 2019 Speaker Highlight: Dr. Joseph Clark

Dr. Joe Clark from the University of Cincinnati will be presenting at this year’s International Symposium on Clinical Neuroscience about the Eye-Brain Axis: Brain Strength & Conditioning for Athletes. For more information about the event, visit ISCN2019.com – Hello, my name is Doctor Jessica Lofgren. And today I am joined by Doctor Joe Clark. Doctor Clark, how are you doing today? – I’m good Jessica, how are you? – I’m am doing great. Thank you so much for being here today. We’re so excited to talk to you. Go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself. – Sure, so my name is Joe Clark, Doctor Joseph Clark. I’m a professor of neurology at the University of Cincinnati. I am a PhD professor, but I do see patients for neurodiagnostics per se, and neuro-rehabilitation. I also am the person who helps takes care of and manage the university athletes should they have a concussion. I kinda specialize in traumatic brain injury, acquired brain injury, which includes stroke, TBI, that type of thing. So I’m very brain-centric, and do clinical work as well as research work. – Awesome, awesome, and so I had been up there for you before for the University of Cincinnati football camp and seen some amazing stuff that you are doing. But we’re on here today to talk about the International Symposium on Clinical Neuroscience. You’re gonna be there this year, and you’re gonna be sharing some information with us. What topic did you choose to discuss this year and why? – Well what I’m gonna be talking about is what I like to refer to as the eye-brain axis. I am very brain-centric, but the eyes provide a lot of information to the brain. And we’ve seen both with our athletes for performance enhancement and with our patients for injury rehab and recovery, that the eye-brain axis can often go wrong, and needs to be rehabilitated through what’s often referred to as vision training. However, many people, lay people as well as technical people, if you say vision training, they often think of what we do with little kids who have a weak eye, like a three year old whose eyes aren’t aligned. That is vision training, that is a component of what we do, but being in neurology and very brain-centric, we do neuro-visual training to help those people get better. And I mean people who have traumatic brain injury, people who have stroke, as well as athletes to help them be better and safer on their fields of competition. – Great, so what you’re gonna pretty much be teaching us at the symposium this year is what exactly that neuro-vision training is and how you’ve had so much success with your athletes at the University of Cincinnati. I know you have a great track record of not having concussions or having a very low incidence of concussions with your team members. – Yeah, so we initiated the neuro-visual training with the football team the summer of 2010. And every year where we’ve done the neuro-visual training with the football team, we’ve had a very low concussion rate. The national average is on the order of 10 concussions per year, per team, and that was our average in 2006, ’07, ’08, and ’09. Since 2010 we’ve been averaging 2.14 concussions per year, and that’s been sustained, with the exception of one year. We had a new coach one year, and he came in and discontinued the vision training, and we went back to 10 concussions. And no disrespect to any coach, you know they make decisions, and then he reevaluated the value of the vision training, re-initiated it, and we went back down to two concussions, or 2.14 concussions per year. So it is sustainable, and there appears to be a kind of wash out if you will, and I’ll be talking a little bit more about that at the ISCN as well. – Well Doctor Clark, that is absolutely incredible. We are so excited to hear more from you at the International Symposium this year. If you’d like to hear more about what Doctor Clark is doing and hear about his topic this year, please visit our website at www.ISCN2019.com, and attend our International Symposium on Clinical Neuroscience, happening May 24th through the 26th in Orlando, Florida. Doctor Clark, thank you so much again for joining us today. – Thanks Jessica, and I’m looking forward to May.