Study: Concussions do not affect children’s IQs
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Key takeaways:
- Children recovering from concussion showed no differences in IQ compared with peers.
- The study results could help clinicians provide guidance on the subject to patients and their parents.
Data from two large studies in Canada and the United States suggest that concussions do not impact the intelligence or IQ scores of children in the months after their injury, according to findings published in Pediatrics.
“The media has talked a lot about concussion and what the outcomes of concussion are both short term and long term for a while,” Ashley L. Ware, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at Georgia State University, told Healio. “But we are still just not able to do some really strong research where we're actually understanding what those consequences of concussion might be.”
Ware and colleagues examined data from two studies that included 566 patients aged between 8 and 16 years who entered one of seven emergency departments at children’s hospitals in Ohio and Canada at most 48 hours after sustaining a concussion or orthopedic injury. The patients completed IQ and performance validity testing between 3 and 18 days after the injury at U.S. EDs or 3 months after the injury at Canadian EDs.
The researchers examined the IQ scores using three statistical models and compared them against the scores of 300 children with other injuries.
The main goal of the study, Ware said, was to establish a foundation of knowledge about the impact of concussions in the months following an injury.
Ultimately, what they found was a very small difference in each group’s mean full-scale IQ — approximately 105 for the concussion arm and 106 for the group with other injuries — and matrix reasoning scores but not vocabulary scores, Ware and colleagues reported.
Overall, the results “provided strong evidence against reduced intelligence in the first few weeks to months after pediatric concussion,” they wrote.
“They were not surprising,” Ware said. “We're showing that the effects of concussion are pretty specific to certain symptoms but are not on a whole going to affect global intellectual functioning.”
Ware said more research is needed on children who do not seek medical treatment for concussions.
“There's a huge gap in knowledge and understanding regarding concussion and health disparities,” Ware said.
In an accompanying commentary, Talin Babikian, PhD, ABPP, a neuropsychologist and associate clinical professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at UCLA, described the study as “methodologically rigorous and well-controlled” and said such studies “provide a foundation for managing expectations in course and recovery after concussion.”
“Brain injuries can lead to significant morbidity, and recovery can feel like a silent disorder with pervasive consequences in the social, emotional, cognitive, academic, and athletic spheres of a young person’s life,” Babikian wrote. “It has been critical to understand the nuances of cognition-based disability to validate patient experiences after a brain injury, to use accurate clinical nomenclature to describe this experience, and to provide necessary interventions and services.”
Babikian recommended focusing recovery on reintegration into “normal life” with needed supports.
“In school-aged children, it has been important to characterize cognitive challenges in the learning environment to qualify students for special education services so that they receive resources specific to their needs that may differ from those of students with common learning disabilities such as dyslexia or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder,” Babikian wrote.
“At the same time,” she wrote, “the cognitive profile of a student with an uncomplicated concussion, or even multiple uncomplicated concussions, differs from the above. As clinicians providing care to young patients with concussion, it is our obligation to be judicious when we listen to, measure, and contextualize cognitive problems, including IQ, after a brain injury.”
References:
Babikian D, et al. Pediatrics. 2023;doi: 10.1542/peds.2023-062182.
Ware AL, et al. Pediatrics. 2023;doi:10.1542/peds.2022-060515.
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