Inhibition of ongoing responses in patients with traumatic brain injury.

In addition to slowness of information processing, it is often assumed that executive functions are deficient in patients with traumatic brain injuries (TBI). The aim of this study was to investigate a specific executive function, the inhibition of ongoing responses in TBI. Twenty-seven patients with TBI and 27 orthopedic patients (OC) performed the stop signal task, which allows the estimation of the time it takes to inhibit an ongoing response. Contrary to expectations, patients with TBI did not perform worse than the OC in the inhibition of ongoing responses. Furthermore, subgroups of the TBI, with frontal and nonfrontal lesions, and with focal versus diffuse damage, did not show any differences in performance. None of the clinical, demographic or neuropsychological data had a significant relationship to inhibition time, apart from age, which showed a significant relationship only in the TBI. It seems likely that deficits in the inhibition of ongoing responses are not very common after TBI.