Research Digest – 12 months of inspiration

By Dr Sara da Silva Ramos, Senior Research Fellow at Brainkind

Research is crucial to discovering the best care and treatment for people living with brain injuries or other neurological conditions. It helps develop innovative solutions and improve the lives of those in need of support.

At Brainkind, we firmly believe that research is for everyone. Our Research Digest enables us to support engagement in research by sharing findings that inspire us and have the potential to positively impact on practice in services or contribute to social change.

There is no better time than the present to look back at what caught our attention in the last 12 months and wonder what lies ahead…

Improving practice

In our quest to better support the people in our care, we asked how the menopause is experienced by people with brain injuries. While we found a small number of well-designed studies, it quickly became clear that what we know at present is still insufficient to be applied in practice. This has inspired us to develop the knowledge in this area by designing our own study, which we plan to pursue in the new year.

Encouraged by Brainkind’s Safeguarding and Safety Partnership Group, we then turned our attention to research investigating aggression and harm between peers in care settings. We delved into a review by SCIE (Social Care Institute of Excellence) and reflected on what research has shown us to date.

We also considered how its findings are especially relevant in the context of rehabilitation and support of those with brain injuries and other neurological conditions, as symptoms, such as cognitive impairment or emotional dysregulation, overlap with many of the risk factors associated with aggression between peers.

We will continue to work closely with our Safeguarding and Safety Partnership Group in the new year to further explore this theme and will share what we learned on Research Digest in 2026.

More recently, staff and people we support at one of our neurological centres motivated us to carefully look at the impact of fasting on the brain.

A very rapid, yet informative, review of the literature by our invited writer concluded that, despite promising findings demonstrating that certain types of fasting may improve brain health, it is still too early to know exactly who should fast, and how.

Therefore, for the time being, the recommendation to anyone considering fasting to promote neurological health and recovery, is to speak with a healthcare professional, who will be able to advise on the best course of action for each person.

Contributing to social change

Around the time of the publication of ‘The Cost to the UK Economy of Acquired Brain Injury’, commissioned by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) and UKABIF (UK Acquired Brain Injury Forum) – independent bodies, with whom Brainkind works in partnership – our Research Digest identified four reasons for investing in inpatient brain injury rehabilitation.

One of the most obvious benefits highlighted both in the APPG / UKABIF report, and in our brief article, is the potential reduction of the current costs to the NHS and social care, not to mention the health, productivity, and wellbeing benefits that investment may bring.

Brainkind subscribes to the APPG / UKABIF recommendations to policymakers, which include making better use of data to reduce inequalities and gain a greater understanding of the impact of brain injury in areas where it is currently not fully considered, such as education, homelessness, and mental health care.

We did a study that is relevant to the recommendation of better use of data. Using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to obtain data about rehabilitation referrals across the 42 Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) in England, we found some gaps in referrals data and ethnicity data, preventing analyses of how the two overlap. The variability in the processes for data collection, and rates of data return, represent a barrier to the development of improvement strategies to audit and mitigate drivers of inequality.

We will share more details about this study on Research Digest in the new year and consider with our readers the implications we think our findings have to achieving the collective aim of making better use of data.

One important development towards the recommendation for obtaining a greater understanding of the impact of brain injury in areas where it is currently not fully considered, was the recent creation of the ABI Social Care Network Incubator led by Professor Andrew Bateman (University of Essex) and Dr Alyson Norman (University of Plymouth). This is one of the NIHR-supported Incubators, which are designed to develop research capacity and professional communities by bringing together key stakeholders.

We were privileged to have been involved in the early stages of development of the ABI Social Care Network Incubator, which welcomes anyone wanting to engage in research that supports people disadvantaged by acquired brain injury, and affected by its invisible consequences (including those with life experiences such as homelessness, migration, domestic abuse, or living with aphasia, executive impairment, memory problems, and changes in behaviour and emotions).

The aim is to support aspiring researchers, build lived-experience networks, and develop and expand a network of supervisors and collaborators to ensure sustainability. We look forward to continuing to contribute to research on ABI and social care and help spread the word about the network’s updates and opportunities in the coming year. Anyone wishing to get involved in the meantime should follow the Heads Together group on LinkedIn.

Progress in research is often slow. But we think that the various topics we shared on Research Digest in 2025 all show promise for further progress and make us hopeful for the future. We welcome suggestions from our readers about what they would like to see covered in the new year. Get in touch at research@brainkind.org

Until then, we wish everyone a positive start to 2026.