Relationship between memory and non-verbal reasoning to injury severity measures after traumatic brain injury

Research

Objectives: To find the association between two injury severity measures after TBI and memory and non-verbal reasoning at baseline, 1 year and 10 years post injury via the Brief Test of Adult Cognition by Telephone (BTACT)

Design: Longitudinal research study with cross-sectional analysis at 1 month post-injury, 1 year post-injury and 10 years post-injury

Setting: Traumatic Brain Injury Model System (TBIMS) data specifically from The University of Alabama at Birmingham(UAB)

Participants: 115, 87, and 82 participants at baseline, Year 1 and Year 10 data collection time points, respectively

Interventions: Not applicable

Main Outcome Measures: The Number Reasoning (non-verbal reasoning) and Delayed Word Recall(memory) tests were used, along with TBIMS coding of extent of intracranial compression within the first 7 days of injury and the length of post-traumatic amnesia (PTA)

Result: The relationship between length of PTA or extent of intracranial compression to results on either the Number Reasoning or the Delayed Word Recall at 10-year post-injury was not statistically significant. At one year, the relationship between PTA and the number reasoning was not significant(p=0.247) and trended towards significant for the delayed word recall(p=0.055). For extent of intracranial compression at one year, the relationship for either neuropsychological test was not significant. (p=0.319 for number reasoning and p=0.570 for delayed word recall). At baseline post-injury, the relationship with PTA was statistically significant for the delayed word recall(p=0.010). For the number reasoning, the p-value was significant(p=0.008). However, a post-hoc test was run and showed that the value was not significant. For the extent of intracranial compression, the relationship was trending significant with (p= 0.059) on the Number Reasoning and (p=0.053) on the Delayed Word Recall.

Conclusions: The relationship between BTACT scores and extent of intracranial compression and length of PTA becomes less strong over time. However, at ~2 weeks post injury, the relationship is statistically significant with length of PTA being a better indicator compared to extent of intracranial compression.
Author(s) Disclosures: No conflicts