Cognitive and psychosocial outcome after head injury in children

Abstract

Neuropsychological and psychosocial assessment of 58 Victorian and South Australian school-aged children who sustained a closed head injury was carried out immediately postinjury and at 6 months follow-up. For those children whose head injury was defined as mild (length of coma less than 1 hour) outcome on all variables was good at both time points. Children with moderate to severe injury (length of coma greater than 1 hour) had lower WISC-R IQ scores at both time points and were particularly poor on reading and spelling measures. There was no improvement over time on the academic measures. Family and parental functioning was in the normative range and, although some children showed a clinical level of behaviour problems, there was no consistency in their clinical status over time nor across parent and teacher informants. Our results suggest that there are no particular concerns for the long-term outcome of mildly head-injured children but that cognitive and school learning problems for moderate to severely head-injured children puts them at continuing risk.