Behavioral Outcomes After Pediatric Closed Head Injury: Relationships With Age, Severity, and Lesion Size

Abstract

This study investigated the behavioral outcomes and adaptive functioning of 138 children with mild to severe closed head injury in the 6- to 16-year age range. Each child was evaluated with the Personality Inventory for Children-Revised. A subset of this sample (n = 77) received the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales. Results revealed little evidence for group differences based on severity of closed head injury on scales associated with psychopathology on the Personality Inventory for Children-Revised. However, children with severe closed head injury were viewed as experiencing more difficulties than children with mild-moderate closed head injury on those components of the Personality Inventory for Children-Revised most closely associated with cognitive functions. In addition, on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, severely injured children had lower scores on the Communication and Socialization scales than children with mild-moderate injury. Relationships between the size of frontal and extrafrontal lesions from concurrent magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral outcomes were not apparent. This study suggests that outcome measures assessing adaptive behavior and cognitive functions are more sensitive to severity of closed head injury than parent-based scales of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology.

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“…Consequently, we used a high score (IIS3) as a threshold in order to consider only the most severe impairments, for which the uncertainty of the prediction is low. The description of injuries associated with such impairments, as well as the similarity in our results compared to those of previous studies with respect to the functional outcome following a TBI, indicate that our predictions are realistic [13,14,37,38].…”

Neuropsychological outcome of infant heart transplant recipients

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