Grant: Operating Grant

Over the last decade, awareness of the problems associated with mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) in children has grown significantly. Although cognitive, behavioural and physical symptoms are reported by the families as well as by the children with mTBI, the results of conventional clinical tests are often negative making their sensitivity questionable. Clinical studies by our team have revealed that children can present with balance and visual perceptual deficits after a MTBI in addition to decreased self confidence at the time of returning to regular activities. Attempts to link these deficits to the results of the imaging examinations have up to now failed. In the first part of the present study, we will ask children with and without a MTBI to perform memory tasks while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging test. This procedure will allow us to examine each subject's brain in activity while they are performing the task. We will also evaluate balance, overall cognitive abilities and variables pertaining to the trauma (severity scores, duration of loss of consciousness, duration of post-traumatic amnesia, characteristics of the head injury sustained). In the second part of the study, one month later, we will reexamine brain function of those children who did not recover from the MTBI with the aim to compare to those who recuperated. We will then be able to compare each profile to its own obtained immediately after the trauma. We believe this study has the potential to provide a powerful diagnostic and prognostic method to document the degree of disability and recovery in children having sustained a mild head injury.