A Comparative Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Concussion on a Computerized Neurocognitive Test and Self-Reported Symptoms

Abstract

When a neurocognitive test was administered within 1 week of injury, the ES was larger for self-reported symptoms than for ImPACT scores generated at the same session. After 1 week of injury, the ESs for ImPACT and PCSS scores were comparable. If the athlete reports symptoms within 1 week of injury, administering a cognitive test does not appear to offer additional information to the clinician. However, if the athlete does not report symptoms postconcussion, cognitive testing may inform the clinical management of the injury.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of factors influencing ImPACT concussion testing in high school and collegiate athletes with self-reported ADHD and/or LD.

“…To increase the available studies for meta-analysis, high school and collegiate athletes were both included in the meta-analyses. This is also consistent with prior literature on ImPACT and ADHD and/or LD that combines age groups (Alsalaheen et al, 2017; Elbin et al, 2013; Guerriero et al, 2018). Meta-analysis was conducted for the following topics: baseline cognitive performance, baseline symptom reporting, invalid baseline classification, and self-reported concussion rates.…”

“…Each ADHD and/or LD group was analyzed separately with healthy athletes (without ADHD and/or LD), serving as the comparison group provided there were three or more studies with available data. Multivariate meta-analysis was not conducted for several reasons including lack of information about the between-scale correlations for each study (for baseline and symptom reporting), consistency with previous meta-analytic research on ImPACT (Alsalaheen et al, 2017), and literature to suggest that the increase in precision from univariate to multivariate meta-analysis is often very small and not clinically meaningful (e.g., a change of less than one-hundredth of an effect size even when scales are highly correlated; Riley et al, 2007; Schwarzer et al, 2015).…”

A Reporting Quality Assessment of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses in Sports Physical Therapy: A Review of Reviews

“…One study reported the STROBE statement as a reporting standard for individual studies, as opposed to a quality assessment tool for meta-analysis [ 65 ]. The STROBE statement is a checklist of items that should be included in reports of cohort studies.…”

“…As shown herein, studies need to classify the effect size computation, variance computation, and equations, and present them in an easily comprehensible manner for readers. However, only 5 of 47 studies described the effect size computation [ 29 , 65 , 67 , 68 , 69 ] ( Supplementary Materials Table S1 ). One benefit of evaluating the effect size is that it quantifies the difference between groups in the observed data [ 70 ].…”

Investigating the diagnostic accuracy of a paper-and-pencil and a computerized cognitive test battery for pediatric mild traumatic brain injury.

“…Advantages of computerized testing over traditional paper-and-pencil neuropsychological assessments include the ability to standardize components of test administration, alternate test forms via the randomized presentation of stimuli, more precisely measure time-based responses, provide immediate results, and easily gather and store data (Broglio et al, 2017; De Marco & Broshek, 2016). Despite these advantages, concerns have also been raised about computerized testing, such as limited examination of psychometric characteristics, varying precision of the measurement associated with a given environment’s operating system and peripherals, and possible limited sampling of neuropsychological functioning (Alsalaheen et al, 2017; Broglio, Katz, et al, 2018; De Marco & Broshek, 2016; Moser et al, 2015). Thus, each approach has its own strengths and limitations.…”