Grant: Project Grant

Cerebral concussions are common and they can affect anyone. Some populations are more at risk, especially teenagers and young male adults. Each year in Canada, about 500-650/100 000 people sustain a concussion (mild Traumatic Brain Injury) and it is suspected that many of them do not even seek medical attention. The management of these patients varies a lot, notably by geographical regions. Most of the data regarding concussion is based on expert opinion. Those patients are rarely admitted and conducting robust and structured studies to recruit a large cohort of patients is difficult. Moreover, 10-56% of patients are at risk of developing persistent symptoms for more than three months after the trauma. It is crucial to target those patients and to monitor them closely. Because of a lack of scientific evidence, no validated guideline has been proposed for the detection of those at-risk patients. There is an urgent need for health care providers to have access to a simple, quick, and reliable clinical decision rule, which could predict if complications/persistent symptoms are to be expected. Our research team is already working to develop tools to better predict the evolution of these patients. Our previous studies have identified significant risk factors for developing persistent symptoms after the injury and we have suggested some predictive models. However, these models are solely based on clinical factors (e.g. age, post-traumatic amnesia, etc.) and do not identify high-risk patients specifically enough. Along with this, none of the different biomarkers (e.g. protein S100B, C-Tau, etc.) studied so far can predict patient evolution on their own. A model integrating clinical criteria AND biomarker(s) would help to better identify patients at risk for persistent symptoms after a concussion. Our research team has recruited more than a thousand patients so far, but we still need to recruit patients to refine our model and validate our results.