Course of Recovery for Closed Head Trauma in Adolescence

摘要

The purpose of the research was to investigate the central nervous system deficits that occur in closed head injured teenagers and the resulting impaired intellectual functioning. If closed head injury adversely effects cognitive performance, what is its time course. Sixty eight subjects in two groups participated in the study. The first group included 33 adolescent admitted to a large University Hospital after a motor vehicle accident. The second group was an uninjured control group recruited from a nearby school. An initial neuropsychological battery of tests was administered to all subjects to assess various cognitive abilities. As predicted the injured subjects scored lower than the control subjects on some the neuropsychological measures. In general, their overall IQ was depressed. The closed head injury had a lower full scale IQ, verbal IQ, and performance IQ scores than their non-injured counterparts.