Kids' brain injuries can cause lingering problems for years, study finds
Courtesy of the Napadano family
Mark Napadano watched in horror as his 13-year-old son slammed head first into the hard ground after a motocross accident. In seconds he was at the side of his son, Sam, terrified by the sight of the junior high athlete so full of life just moments before lying limp in front of him - and not breathing. “It was like a nightmare,” Mark remembers.
At the hospital doctors examined Sam and gave Mark the frightening news: Sam had a large pocket of blood pooling near the top of his head and two smaller bleeds in the front and two in the back. “They didn’t say he was going to die, but they didn’t say he was going to live,” recalls the 45-year-old car dealer.
Sam was in a coma for days and in critical care for almost a month. By the time he was released to a rehab facility the 5-foot-4-inch teen had dropped from a trim and muscular 114 pounds to just 84. For months Mark and his wife, Sue, watched as their son learned to talk and walk for a second time.
Now, three years after the wreck Sam is almost back to where he was before, Mark says. Sam returned to school three months after the accident and kept up his rehab for two years. He still has some short term memory problems and though his working memory has improved, it can be a challenge if too many commands are thrown his way at the same time.
While conventional wisdom is that children have a great capacity to overcome damage from a severe traumatic brain injury, or TBI, because their brains are still developing and “plastic,” a new study shows that many may actually end up with some lasting deficits. The study followed 56 children for 10 years after they’d sustained a TBI between the ages of 2 and 7.
During the study, the Australian researchers repeatedly examined the children’s intellectual abilities, as well as social and behavioral skills, according to the report published in Pediatrics.
The report confirmed earlier research showing that most kids with mild TBIs recover completely, but the prognosis for children with more severe injuries is less predictable.
These new data suggest that “the majority of these kids will have long-term problems,” says the study’s lead author Vicki Anderson, a researcher at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne. “And while there was some ‘spontaneous’ recovery, those who had access to rehab did better.”
