Neuropsychological function in adolescents sustaining mild closed head injury.

Adolescents sustaining mild closed head injury were evaluated for mental functioning immediately following injury. Evaluation of their neuropsychological performance in comparison with healthy adolescents and adolescents sustaining severe closed head injury revealed a pattern distinct from the other two groups. Mildly injured patients exhibited some dysfunction in verbally based measures of learning, abstraction, and reasoning, while appearing unimpaired on measures of attention, motor speed, and visual memory.