A small subset of individuals that have experienced mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) may
experience persistent cognitive deficits more than a year following the head injury.
Neuroimaging studies reveal structural and functional changes in frontal areas of the brain,
exacerbated when loss of consciousness is experienced, and indicate that these changes may be
progressive in nature for some people. Social support and social participation have, however,
been suggested to confer cognitive reserve - neurocognitive protection against cognitive decline.
Analyses were run on Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) neuropsychological data,
consisting of individuals who experienced mTBI with loss of consciousness (n = 536 for less
than 1 minute, and n = 435 for unconsciousness between 1 and 20 minutes) more than a year
prior, and 13,163 no-head injury comparisons. These same individuals were re-assessed three
years later.
The results presented in this thesis suggest that at a year or more after a single mTBI with loss of
consciousness, a small subset of individuals are more likely to be impaired on prospective
memory and other executive functioning tasks, relative to comparisons. In addition, when
examined at three-year follow-up, those who experienced mTBI with longer duration of
unconsciousness were more likely to exhibit cognitive decline relative to those who experienced
less unconsciousness or comparisons. Moreover, greater social participation over the past year,
and more perceived social support were predictive of lessened cognitive deterioration in those
individuals.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/41923 |
| Date | 25 March 2021 |
| Creators | Bedard, Marc |
| Contributors | Taler, Vanessa |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds