Attentional Control Ten Years Post-Childhood Traumatic Brain Injury: The Impact of Lesion Presence, Location, and Severity in Adolescence and Early Adulthood.

The relationship between brain injury and attentional control (AC) long after a childhood traumatic brain injury (TBI) has received limited investigation. The aim of this article was to investigate the impact that lesion presence, location, and severity has on AC in a group of young persons who had sustained a moderate to severe TBI 10 years earlier during childhood. The participants in this study were a subset of a larger 10-year, follow-up assessment comprised of 31 persons in late adolescence and early adulthood (21 males), with a mean age at testing of 15.4 years (standard error 0.6; range 10.7-21.2 years). Analyses revealed that in regard to AC abilities, the presence of a lesion(s) appears to have a differential effect depending on the testing measure used. When using standardized testing with subtests of the TEA-ch, no differences in performance between those with and those without a lesion at 10 years post-TBI were found. On standardized behavioral measures such as parental reports of perceived AC (Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function), however, the presence of a lesion was found to have a detrimental effect on the ability to self-regulate and monitor behavior in late adolescence and the early stages of adulthood. We discuss these results and propose that there is a network of brain regions associated with AC, and generalized lesions have the greatest influence on such abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]