Impairment of memory functions after acute head injury

The effects of minor closed head injury upon human memory: Further evidence on the role of mental imagery

“…Finally, a decrement in performance might also arise if head-injured subjects were less able to encode pictures of common objects in the form of verbal descriptions or labels (cf. Fodor, 1972).…”

“…They were all cases of minor head injury, the longest period of anterograde amnesia (from the trauma to the return of continuous memory, as determined from the reports of the patients themselves at the time of assessment and any corroborating evidence) being seven hours. As in previous investigations (Fodor, 1972;Gronwall & Wrightson, 1974;Richardson, 1979a), patients were excluded if they had a history of previous head injury requiring hospital treatment, if they had a history of psychiatric illness, if they were receiving medication at the time of testing, or if they showed evidence of complications, such as intracranial haematoma. The control subjects were male accident cases of the same age range who had been admitted for orthopaedic treatment, and who showed no evidence of any head injury.…”

Cognitive recovery after severe head injury. 2. Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale during post-traumatic amnesia.

“…PTA appears to be characterized primarily by a failure of mnestic processes, insofar as the patient on subsequent questioning is able to recall at best only isolated incidents which occurred during this period. It is not surprising therefore to find that the psychological studies on head-injured persons during PTA have been concerned above all with memory (Fodor, 1972;Dunn and Brooks, 1974). With the possible exception of a paper by Ruesch and Moore (1943), studies of other cognitive abilities during this critical phase of recovery appear to be lacking, despite the fact that patients in PTA are often capable of speech and might therefore be supposed to be capable of submitting to psychological examination.…”

Prediction of global outcome with acute neuropsychological testing following closed-head injury

“…Early testing of patients while they are in PTA is possible even with severely head-injured patients, given that the tests are relatively simple. This has been demonstrated by researchers in the past (Ewert et al, 1989;Fodor, 1972;Levin et al, 1988b;Meyers & Levin, 1992;Ruesch & Moore, 1943) and more recently by Hannay et al (1994). Such assessments can be important for planning individualized rehabilitation regimens and for the projection of outcome data for head-injured patients discharged from hospital care before clearing PTA.…”

“…Since this pioneering effort, relatively little has been done to study the validity and utility of neuropsychological testing during the early stages of recovery following head injury (Ewert et al, 1989;Fodor, 1972;Meyers & Levin, 1992). This paucity of research may stem from the commonly held belief that neuropsychological testing during early recovery from head injury, especially during PTA, is not possible because of pervasive arousal and attentional problems in the population (Stuss & Buckle, 1992).…”