A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts / The study reviews the literature concerning mild head
injury and post concussion symptoms. It then investigates
the applicability of international findings to South
African patients. Three groups of subjects are compared:
mildly injured, noninjured, and instructed malingerers. The
study establishes base rates of postconcussive symptoms in
the noninjured subjects, scores on tests of cognitive
ability among the noninjured subjects, expectations
regarding postconcussive sequelae among the noninjured
subjects, the perceptions of injured subjects of their preand
postmorbid status, and relationships between
subjectively experienced symptoms and cognitive deficits
am.ong injured subjects. Injured subgroups are examined to
investigate pre-, peri-, and post-injury factors associated
with development of postconcussive complaints. No
differences in cognitive performance were found between the
injured and noninjured groups. Time since injury did not
affect cognitive performance, apart from on a copy task. It
was found that injured subjects reported lower pre-injury
levels of incidence of symptoms than those reported by
noninjured subjects. No differences were found between
post-injury reporting of postconcussive complaints and
those symptoms reported by noninjured controls. Some
postconcussive symptoms were nevertheless found to
correlate with certain measures of cognitive performance.
Instructed malingerers responded differently noninjured injured and not injured subjects, reporting fewer pre-injury complaints and mere post-injury complaints. They also performed more poorly on several cognitive measures. Test scores that effectively identified malingerers were then re-examined, and cut-off rates suggested for differentiating malingerers from genuinely injured subjects. / Andrew Chakane 2018
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/26218 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Kuun, Terence Michael |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
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