The correlates of aggression in people with acquired brain injury: A preliminary retrospective study

Abstract

The results highlight some variables related to aggression by patients with ABI in the hospital environment and can be utilized in staff education and training programmes to increase the awareness of risk factors.

Clinical correlates of verbal aggression, physical aggression and inappropriate sexual behaviour after brain injury

“…In contrast to some previous studies [8,10,11], no predictive value was found for post-injury aggression (either verbal or physical) in being of male sex, having lower education or a history of pre-morbid drug and alcohol misuse. Again, this merits replication with standardized assessment tools that might lead to more reliable data with potentially different results.…”

“…Some group studies exploring potential relationships between post-injury aggression and neurocognitive status after brain injury have achieved this [6][7][8]. Others, though, have relied on less direct measures such as semi-structured interviews, typically getting their information from relatives of the injured person or ward staff [4,[9][10][11]. Although such methods can be useful, it is problematic to rely entirely on retrospective reports by relatives and others who may be unfamiliar with disordered behaviours and inexperienced in describing and evaluating them.…”

“…Pre-morbid psychosocial variables have been found to be associated with post-injury aggression, such as a history of pre-morbid violence [8,9,11], prior drug and alcohol misuse [8], male sex and lower socio-economic status [10,11]. One study [15] found no association with sex or prior drug and alcohol misuse.…”

“…These have included the presence of frontal lobe lesions [8,[17][18][19][20][21], poorer neurocognitive function [6,7,10] and greater functional impairment [7,11]. Two studies [6,10] reported no relationship between post-injury aggression and current emotional status, although the latter found a link with major depression.…”

Modelling verbal aggression, physical aggression and inappropriate sexual behaviour after acquired brain injury

“…While there have been a number of studies investigating the nature and clinical correlates of aggressive behaviours following brain injury [3,[8][9][10][11][12][13], only a handful have looked at inappropriate sexual behaviours [7,9,14 -18]. Fewer still have addressed both aggressive and inappropriate sexual behaviours within the same sample of patients, with mixed results to date concerning the co-occurrence of these behaviours [7,17,18].…”