Changes of cognitive functioning following mild traumatic brain injury over a 3-month period.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE

To examine the cognitive functioning in patients with complicated mild traumatic brain injury immediately post-injury and at 1 and 3 months post-injury. RESEARCH DESIGN, METHODS, AND PROCEDURES: Between-group comparisons were adopted for this study. Specifically, both patients and healthy controls were administered neuropsychological assessments measuring attention, memory and executive functions at three time points.

RESULTS

Findings indicate that patients performed significantly more poorly in information processing and divided attention, sustained attention, verbal recognition and verbal fluency immediately post-injury. While the information processing and divided attention of mild TBI patients improved at 1 month and returned to normal at 3 months post-injury, their sustained attention remained significantly poorer over the 3-month period.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings suggest that attention dysfunction is noticeable immediately following a mild TBI. Different attention functions appear to recover at a different pace over time, suggesting that the condition may have a differential impact on the different sub-types of attention.