Prevalence of traumatic brain injury and epilepsy among prisoners in France: Results of the Fleury TBI study

Abstract

Objective: The first aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of TBI and epilepsy in a French prison population and to study variables known to be associated with TBI. The second aim was to compare prisoners with and without a history of TBI.

Participants: All offenders (females, males and juveniles) admitted consecutively to Fleury-Mérogis prison over a period of 3 months were included in the study.

Design: During the admission procedure, offenders were interviewed by healthcare staff using a self-reported questionnaire.

Results: In all, 1221 prisoners were included. The rates of TBI and epilepsy were high, with a prevalence of 30.6% and 5.9%, respectively. Psychiatric care, anxiolytic and antidepressant treatment, use of alcohol and cannabis were all significantly higher among offenders with a history of TBI. Moreover, the number of times in custody and the total time spent in jail over the preceding 5 years were significantly higher among offenders with a history of TBI.

Conclusions: These results provide further evidence that specific measures need to be developed such as, first of all, screening for TBI upon arrival in prison.

Keywords:

• Prisoners
• traumatic brain injury
• inmates
• head injury
• neuropsychology

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to Professor H. Williams for his contribution to the creation of the questionnaire. We would like to thank Dr. Max Westby, Dr. R. Katz and Mr. James Moore for having scrutinized the manuscript and Mme. G. Bard, for collecting the data, collating references and formatting the text. We would also like to thank the physicians and nurses from the Fleury-Mérogis medical team who participated in the administration of the questionnaire. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on the first version of the manuscript, which enabled us to improve it. Preliminary results of this work have already been presented at the SOFMER (Reims 2013) and ESPRM-SOFMER meetings (Marseille 2014).

Declaration of interest

This study was funded by ‘Fondation des Gueules Cassées’ and has been supported by the ‘Centre Ressources du Traumatisme Crânien Ile de France’ and Sorbonne Univ 540 Paris 06, UMR 7371, UMR S 1146, Laboratoire d’Imagerie Biomédicale, F-75005, Paris, France. The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.