About nine percent of youth are said to suffer a sort of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) which can lead to social and psychological problems, according to the Swedish health registries.
A set of 100,000 children and adolescents in Sweden were known to sustain at least one traumatic injury before the age of 25, as per the journal PLOS Medicine.
This group is compared to their “unaffected” siblings and monitored them until they turned 41.
It was then discovered that TBI predicted later “risk of premature mortality, psychiatric inpatient admission, psychiatric outpatient visits, disability pension, welfare recipiency, and low educational attainment.”
“The effects were stronger for those with greater injury severity, recurrence, and older age at first injury,” said leading scientist Seena Fazel of the University of Oxford.
Researchers Donald Redelmeier and Sheharyar Raza of the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto clarified that the results of the Oxford study are derived from comparing two groups of people.
Relative risks might then be questionable if given different groups.
“Most individuals seem to recover fully,” and “most individuals do not experience adverse outcomes,” said Redelmeier and Sheharyar.
The longer term effects of brain injury remain unknown until today.
Redelmeier and Sheharyar added that the study could not prove that brain injury cause such problems in later life, except that an association exists.
A couple of outside experts viewed the results as something dubious, and the other one–positive.
University of Exeter neuropsychology professor Huw Williams is convinced and saw it “incredibly strong”
“They’ve taken huge care to try to manage a whole range of covariates and confounders and the story is very consistent with what is emerging across various areas (sports, crime and mental health) that traumatic brain injury (TBI), of various levels of severity, is problematic in the long term,” Williams said.
sources: gmanews, bangkokpost
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