Meningitis can damage a person's brain, causing long-term disability, including problems with motor function, memory, vision, hearing, and other issues. Rehabilitation can help a person regain lost functions after meningitis.
Often, rehabilitation specialists will get you out of your hospital bed and start working with you right away, and most people see improvement by the end of a rehab program.
How Meningitis Can Wreak Havoc on the Brain
Your central nervous system — your brain and spinal cord — regulates everything you do, including your movements, vision, hearing, and balance, as well as your emotions, judgment, and ability to solve problems. When meningitis strikes, it can interfere with those processes.
“In some cases, [brain damage] is a direct effect of inflammation,” says William Pease, MD, chair of the physical medicine and rehabilitation department at Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus. There can be so much infection that the swollen meninges — tissues that are inflamed during meningitis — can put pressure on the brain or spinal cord, explains Dr. Pease. The inflammation can damage blood vessels, which may lead to problems in some areas of your nervous system because of lack of blood flow.
Brain damage can also happen because inflammation triggers chemicals or toxins that damage cells, Pease says. It becomes a domino effect because as one cell breaks down, it triggers the death of more cells.
Retraining the Brain
The first step of rehabilitation is to gauge which functions have been lost, and secondly, to create a treatment program to address the losses. “There are two tracks of rehabilitation,” explains Pease. “We try to restore function so the brain and body work like they did before, and we teach compensating strategies.” These compensating strategies can help you find new ways to manage tasks that are no longer easy after a severe bout of meningitis.
During rehabilitation you’ll work with a variety of meningitis specialists who can help you with your goals. They may include a:
- Physiatrist (physical medicine specialist)
- Physical, occupational, and speech therapists
- Audiologist (hearing specialist)
“One of the things we talk about regarding the brain is that it has plasticity or resiliency,” Pease says. “It always has the capacity to work better if we work on training it.”
Someone who has had brain damage can coach their brain to perform functions that are lost and re-learn the motor pattern to make it happen, Pease says.
For example, if you’ve lost the ability to walk due to meningitis, most of the work you would do in a rehabilitation program would involve reprogramming your brain and body to allow you to walk again without thinking about it. “You’ll hear and see therapists tell patients to bend their hip when they take a step,” Pease says. As patients practice over and over to bend their hip for each step, they are rehearsing the patterns of movement until the body can perform the task automatically.
For Many, the Hard Work Pays Off
“Most people do see improvement,” Pease says. Among the people who go through his rehabilitation program at Ohio State University Medical Center — which, in addition to meningitis patients, includes people who have had strokes or other neurological events — about 70 percent are able to go home from the hospital, which means they can move around their home and take care of themselves adequately.
Others may need a longer-term facility for more work. “When we do follow-up studies with patients, about 95 percent of patients are home three months later,” he says.
Whether it happens before hospital discharge or continues in a rehabilitation facility afterwards, rehab may be the key to getting your life back to normal after your neurologic system has been through the ravages of meningitis.