Matthew Burke

Rowan’s Law Day Clinical Update on Sport Concussion: Free webinar on September 24th at 12:00pm ET.

🔗: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

@sunnybrookhsc.bsky.social @parachute.ca @mattburkemd.bsky.social

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Inform and Do No Harm: A Novel Approach to Reduce Negative Effects of Mental Health Awareness

My student Dasha Sandra tackled growing concerns about false self-diagnosis following awareness efforts and found a promising solution. Thread /1

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Somatic Symptom Disorder After Mild Traumatic Brain Injury : The Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation care centers. Participants: Adults with mTBI (N = 476). Design: Secondary analysis of a clinical trial (Clinicaltrials.gov NCT04704037). Main Measures: Early illness beliefs (Illness Percepti...

New paper with @mattburkemd.bsky.social, @davidlewisperez.bsky.social: Somatic Symptom Disorder after concussion/mTBI was associated with worse symptoms, comorbidity, and disability. SSD may be a useful framework for conceptualizing poor outcome from this injury.
journals.lww.com/headtraumare...

Outstanding #BrainMedicine conference led by #SaraMitchell & #SarahLevitt from the University of Toronto! Great to see momentum growing to erode silos & integrate neurologic, psychiatric, & rehabilitative perspectives for complex brain disorders. #SarahLidstone @mattburkemd.bsky.social

Very honoured to receive the 2025 AAN Norman Geschwind Prize for my research trying to better understand disorders and phenomena at the interfaces of Neurology and Psychiatry

Very grateful to all my mentors and colleagues @sunnybrookhsc.bsky.social @uoftmedicine.bsky.social
@harvardmed.bsky.social

Standing room only for 2 hour symposium on functional neurological disorder (#FND) at the #AAN2025 meeting - with a focus on functional seizures, post concussive syndrome / functional cognitive disorder & pathophysiology. #BarbaraDworetzky @mattburkemd.bsky.social

Great intro to a promising session here at #nans2025 by @mattburkemd.bsky.social - do you know all the famous 🇨🇦 neuroscientists - Penfield, Milner, Hebb, Jasper and many more

Our findings will be shared by Dr. Saarah Haque in the Clinical Platform Presentation session this afternoon at the American Neuropsychiatric Association Annual Meeting in Montreal 2/2

@uoftmedicine.bsky.social

Remission of alcohol use disorder following traumatic brain injury with focal orbitofrontal cortex hemorrhage: case report and network mapping - Communications Medicine Haque et al. report a case of chronic alcohol use disorder that had early remission following a traumatic brain injury with left orbitofrontal cortex intracerebral hemorrhage. Mapping of this lesion c...

Could having a TBI ever be paradoxically beneficial?

We report a case of a patient with chronic refractory alcohol use disorder that went into remission following a TBI with a focal OFC hemorrhage 1/2

@commsmed.bsky.social @foxmdphd.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Development of a diagnostic checklist to identify functional cognitive disorder versus other neurocognitive disorders Background Functional cognitive disorder (FCD) poses a diagnostic challenge due to its resemblance to other neurocognitive disorders and limited biomarker accuracy. We aimed to develop a new diagnosti...

neurologyopen.bmj.com/content/7/1/...

Very pleased to see this diagnostic aid for Functional cognitive disorders out. It needs further testing but i m feeling optimistic given the cumulative wisdom of the clinicians who kindly provided input into the development

Collaboration with our great Sunnybrook multi-specialty Trauma team (ICU, Neuro, Psych and Rehab) and @silverberglab.bsky.social

Identifying mild traumatic brain injury in the post-acute polytrauma setting: a scoping review of diagnostic approaches and screening tools Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is frequently overlooked in polytrauma patients due to the overshadowing of more severe injuries, a fact that makes its identification in post-acute settings chal...

Our new review looks at the evidence (or lack thereof) for identifying mTBI/concussion in post-acute polytrauma settings

Challenges re: legitimately missing a mTBI (distracting injuries) with risk of overDx as Sx (e.g. headache, brain fog etc) are non-specific
www.tandfonline.com/eprint/I7PSG...

Opinion: When the body won’t heal In the midst of the pandemic, my world imploded. I was diagnosed with eye-brain issues. I could not look at a screen. I withdrew from almost everyone dear to me. I was lost, and seemingly no one could...

www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

Unbeknownst to me, my patient wrote about her struggles and recovery from a head injury triggering FND

Great to see a full page spread in @theglobeandmail.com on a topic that needs more attention

Her eloquent narrative is a perfect (and timely) complement to our recent BJSM piece. Article ⬇️

How common is FND?

‘Incidence and Prevalence of Functional Neurological Disorder: A systematic review’ – a new open access article in JNNP led by Sara Finkelstein with Clare Diamond, and @alancarson15.bsky.social
jnnp.bmj.com/content/earl... 1/🧵

Finally, many of these themes have been articulated by @alancarson15.bsky.social @jonstoneneuro.bsky.social @lauramcw.bsky.social and others...but have not yet made their way to mainstream concussion care. We hope this practical framework helps bridge gaps and increase crosstalk between disciplines

when they may actually benefit most from an opposite approach utilizing CBT-based principles and aiming to reduce symptom preoccupation, redirect attention, reframe beliefs, and encourage graded exposure to avoided activities (reducing fear avoidance behaviors).

We try to summarize the implications of these issues through a case vignette in the Online Supplement. We discuss how a patient with FND triggered by head injury may be harmed by some standard PCS/PPCS rehabilitation protocols that encourage close monitoring of symptoms etc

We also hone in on Curve 3 - synergism between concussion and FND presenting a potential ‘two hit’ hypothesis to the same/vulnerable brain circuits. We had to squish this into the figure legend due to word limits...but certainly worth a read.

This includes discussion of brain/body threat signaling mechanisms and nocebo effects (negative expectations generating/amplifying symptoms). The latter can be induced by well-intentioned public health campaigns, media coverage of rare cases with catastrophic outcomes etc.

In this piece, we start with a general intro to FND for a sports/ER/generalist audience who may be largely unaware of or hold misconceptions about FND. We then explore traditional and emerging models for how/why head injury is increasingly triggering FND in patients

Ignoring this diagnostic heterogeneity has significantly held back concussion research and continues to impact patient outcomes

These curves are often wrongfully all given the same label of post-concussion syndrome/symptoms (PCS/PPCS)...but some patients may have not even had a concussion in the first place (FND triggered by head/neck injury) and others may have a complex interplay between concussion and FND.

New to #bluesky and excited to share a new publication at the interface of my two main clinical interests in neuropsychiatry.

"New Framework for the Continuum of Concussion and Functional Neurological Disorder" with @silverberglab.bsky.social in BJSM. Thread below 🧵

bjsm.bmj.com/content/earl...