Concussion testing may induce mental fatigue, study finds

Testing athletes for concussions may induce mental fatigue in patients whether or not they have a head injury, according to researchers from Penn State University.

The study and its findings — which create a baseline measurement of how tiring the neuropsychological tests can make healthy, athletically active patients — were published in Clinical Neurophysiology. A standard method of testing for concussion, according to a Penn State news release, is a set of neuropsychological tests taking anywhere from 1½ hours to 2 hours to complete. These tests, according to the study authors, are enough to make anybody tired.

"Testing for a long period of time can induce fatigue," study author Semyon M. Slobounov, PhD, stated in the release. "But at the same time, fatigue is a symptom of concussion. How do you rule out fatigue if you get fatigued while taking the test?"

For the study, the researchers recruited 14 athletically active and neurologically normal volunteers. Throughout the testing duration, the authors measured self-reported fatigue, neuropsychological performance and electroencephalographic (EEG) activity.

Over the course of testing, the authors found the volunteers demonstrated increases in self-reported fatigue, increases in errors on the Stroop Interference Test, and significant increases in EEG readings that would indicate diminished cognitive performance.

"Fatigue can be characterized by a sensation of weariness, reduction in motivation, attenuation in efficiency or impairments in vigilance and task performance," the authors wrote. "It is a multidimensional construct with subjective, behavioral and physiological components. A comprehensive characterization of fatigue thus requires the assessment of all three domains."

Reference:
Barwick F, Arnett P, Slobounov S. EEG correlates of fatigue during administration of a neuropsychological test battery. Clin Neurophysiol. 2011. doi:10.1016/j.clinph.2011.06.027

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