Action for Brain Injury Week

By Eleanor Kennedy

It’s Action for Brain Injury Week this week (8th – 14th May), a campaign run by the non-profit brain injury association Headway.  This year the campaign is all about “A New Me”, giving a platform to survivors and their families to discuss how life-changing a brain injury can be. In honour of the campaign, I’m writing a summary about my PhD research on mild traumatic brain injury.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an injury to the head that results in an alteration in consciousness. My work focuses on mild TBI, which injury involves symptoms such as confusion/disorientation, loss of consciousness of less than 30 minutes and/or memory loss around the event that led to the injury.

I’m interested in how mild TBI in youth may be associated with later behaviour. Initially I conducted a systematic review of the literature and found that there was evidence for an association between childhood mild TBI and behaviours such as substance use, committing crimes and behavioural issues. However, this was based on a small number of studies and there were some limitations to be addressed.

A key issue was the use of appropriate control participants. In this kind of research, the behaviour of participants with mild TBI has been compared to that of participants with no injuries. These control participants are usually similar to the mild TBI group in terms of demographic factors such as age, gender and socioeconomic background. However, these similarities do not consider injury factors that could also have an impact on behaviour, for example pain, absence from school, and the trauma of having an injury. A second control group that includes participants with a non-head-related injury addresses this issue.

In my own research, I use data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Children and Adolescents (ALSPAC). This is a birth cohort that began in the early nineties when over 14, 000 pregnant women were recruited; biological, genetic, environmental and psychological information has been gathered on participating families ever since. Participants and their parents have answered questions relating to head injury and fractures at many time points across the children’s life time. It is possible to have a group with mild TBI, a group with broken bone history and a group with neither injury.

So far, we have explored the association between mild TBI from birth to age 16 years and risk behaviour at age 17 years. We found that participants with a mild TBI were more likely to use alcohol to a hazardous level than participants with a broken bone and participants with no injury. This is in line with previous research, and has important implications for recurrent TBI and recovery from TBI. Another finding was that participants with either a mild TBI or a broken bone were more likely to commit offences – suggesting that there may be common risk factors for acquiring an injury and criminal behaviour. For example, an individual who has the personality trait of sensation seeking could potentially be more likely to get into risky situations leading to injuries and to commit offences.

I recently presented these findings at the International Brain Injury Association’s 12th World Congress in New Orleans. At the conference, there was an exhibition of masks created as part of a project called ‘Unmasking Brain Injury’. Each mask was designed and decorated by a survivor of brain injury to share their experience; each mask was as unique as the individuals’ story. Projects that give a voice to people living with a brain injury, such as ‘A New Me’ campaign, are a reminder of the challenges that are faced when dealing with a brain injury. It’s a privilege to contribute research to this field and to listen to the voices of those experiencing it to promote awareness and compassion.