| Sustained attention and processing speed was investigated in 9–14 year old children diagnosed with either Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Both TBI and ADHD are disorders that result in similar behavioral and cognitive dysfunction. Additionally, the underlying neuropathology for both conditions involves similar brain structures. Therefore, archival medical records were examined and scores from various neurobehavioral tests of sustained attention and processing speed were recorded. Additionally, for the children diagnosed with TBI, the level of injury severity was determined, and only those who had sustained a mild or moderate TBI were included in this study. The present study was conducted to contribute to the literature base in a valuable way, by gaining understanding of neuropsychological functioning of children with milder forms of head injury. Secondarily, this study explored whether the current disparity between treatment approaches for children with TBI and those with ADHD are adequate.; There were significant differences found between the groups on some, but not all of the tests of sustained attention and processing speed. However, on the particular tests where there were significant differences, scores were within normal limits. Therefore, overall test performance between children with ADHD and mild-moderate TBI was more similar than dissimilar and thus, essentially undistinguishable from one another, at least on the measures used in this study. Importantly, this revealed that performance on neurobehavioral tasks of attention and processing speed does not add any unique contribution to aid in diagnosis.; Finally, based upon informal analysis only, there was initial evidence that the children with mild TBI did not evidence significant neuropsychological impairments after 6 months or more post-injury. However, future research needs to include pure mild head injured groups as well as an age/education matched control group in order to fully understand the meaning of these results. |
