Alcohol and other predictors of cognitive recovery after severe head injury

Abstract

The research examined the effects of alcohol and other variables on cognitive outcome after severe head injury. Alcohol consumption habitually and at the time of injury were strongly related, and both were related to age and educational level but not injury severity. Covariance analysis to remove the effects of age and education showed a reduction in the main effects, so that only alcohol consumption at injury was a significant predictor of memory, but not other cognitive areas late after injury. There were significant interactions between severity of injury (post-traumatic amnesia), and alcohol habitually or at time of injury, with increasing alcohol consumption increasing the size of the memory deficit. To have a short post-traumatic amnesia and have drunk heavily led to a worse memory score than that found in patients with a considerably longer post-traumatic amnesia who had drunk lightly or not at all.

Alcohol Abuse and Traumatic Brain Injury: Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Neuropsychological Outcome

“…Similar findings are also evident in other cognitive and behavioral measures wherein alcohol users manifest lower cognitive status at hospital discharge following a TBI as measured by the Rancho Level of Cognitive Functioning (Sparadeo and Gill, 1989), and post-injury measures of verbal learning and memory (Brooks et al, 1989;Ronty et al, 1993;Tate et al, 1999), general intellect and verbal reasoning (Dikmen et al, 1993;Kaplan and Corrigan, 1992;Kelly et al, 1997b), visual-spatial functioning (Tate et al, 1999), and rehabilitation outcome (Corrigan et al, 1997).…”

Early outcome in patients with traumatic brain injury, pre-injury alcohol abuse and intoxication at time of injury

“…In fact, as already described, some studies [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] have shown that acute intoxication and pre-injury alcohol abuse have a negative impact on PTA duration and outcomes, but other studies did not show a significant effect among the variables mentioned above [13,24,25] or showed only a modest relationship. Contradictory results were also found for length of stay (LOS) [16,21,23] where some studies did not shown a longer LOS for patients intoxicated upon admission or with a pre-injury history of alcohol abuse.…”

“…These measures are useful in the context of an acute hospital setting and meaningful to clinicians involved with patients post-TBI in this setting. Moreover, these outcome measures were chosen in order to be able to compare the results of the present study with previous work carried out in rehabilitation settings where these are frequently also used as well as measures of independence in self-care activities [15,17,25].…”

Alcohol and Drug Use Among Young Persons with Traumatic Brain Injury

“…Their investigation revealed that positive blood alcohol levels at admission were associated with higher levels of agitation, lower cognitive status at time of hospital discharge, and longer stays in acute care settings. In addition, Brooks et al (1989) found that high blood alcohol levels at admission were related to worse performance on postinjury measures of verbal learning and memory. A later study provided evidence that patients with a history of excessive alcohol use have more severe brain abnormalities and a higher mortality rate (Ruff et al, 1990).…”