Stefan
16-year-old boy

This 16-year-old male suffered a severe traumatic brain injury and facial fractures in a motor vehicle accident. His rehabilitation progressed well and he returned to live in the family home. A year after his injury he planned to return to school to do his HSC and eventually go to University, as he had always intended to do.

A review neuropsychological assessment was conducted around the same time.

On interview the young man complained that he forgets things he has been told, needs to go over and over information to remember it, needs to reread paragraphs to be able to understand what he is reading, and has difficulty following conversations.

The assessment found:

• he had a very short span of attention
• he could not divide attention (unable to follow more than one thing at a time)
• his processing speed was slow
• new learning was poor, information needed to be repeated
• he did not recall much after a delay
• he had difficulties remembering if his learning was interrupted by another task or different information]
• he was disorganised and did not plan how to work things out
• some concrete reasoning
• rapid fatigue when maintaining mental effort

He also demonstrated:

• general problem solving skills at an appropriate level
• excellent arithmetical ability
• good adaptive skills, so could modify what he was doing to meet change and utilise feedback
• he was able to recognise more information than he was able to recall
• some insight towards his cognitive difficulties
• an eagerness to get into University (which may be good or bad).

 

 

Alex:
40-year-old man

This 40-year-old man suffered a head injury in a motor vehicle accident. He is married with a family and had maintained full time employment for a number of years as a lecturer. He complained that since his injury he is forgetful, loses things, has difficulty finding the right word to say, and feels uncomfortable in social situations but manages better in one-to-one situations.

During the interview this man sometimes seemed a bit vague although was very talkative and his conversation often went off topic. At the time of assessment he was keen to return to some form of employment due to increasing financial concerns at home. In his eagerness he was applying for a variety of part time positions, which he could get but could not sustain.

Findings from a neuropsychological assessment indicated:

• he had difficulties concentrating over time and difficulty keeping track of more than one thing at a time
• it was taking him much longer to complete things
• he was only able to learn small amounts of new information
• he was disorganised
• he had difficulty thinking of new ideas
• his reasoning skills were concrete
• his self monitoring was poor (verbose, off-track conversation)
• he was experiencing a high level of anxiety.

However he also showed:

• that his memory for old knowledge is intact
• he could remember the small amount of information he had learnt
• he has a good attention span
• he is able to problem solve at quite a complex level.

Tristen:
20-year-old-man

This 20-year-old man suffered a hypoxic brain injury** as a result of attempted hanging. At the time of his injury he had been working full-time as a truck driver and was living on his own.

When seen for assessment he was very polite, friendly and cooperative. He answered questions simply, followed instructions precisely, and sometimes needed additional prompting to continue with a task. (Essentially he did exactly what he was told to do without question). This man wanted to get better and believed that rehabilitation was helping him a lot.

A neuropsychological assessment indicated that he:

• had significant and generalised cognitive impairment
• had a very short attention span
• could not keep track of things
• was very slow
• registered only a small amount of information and repeating things did not help him to learn more
• was very poor problem solving
• was disorganised
• had a concrete thinking style
• had severe executive dysfunction (cognitive inflexibility, poor self-monitoring eg. rule breaking, limited generation of new ideas)
• was poor at initiation
• had limited insight about his cognitive difficulties.

However he;

• was able to follow simple, direct instructions
• could remember the very small amount of information that he initially registered
• could complete simple problem solving and simple calculations.

** Hypoxic Brain Injury occurs when the brain has been deprived of oxygen to some degree. The person would be likely to suffer memory impairment and severely slowed processing speed, with flexibility, self-monitoring and visual deficits. They might also have a generalised dulling of cognitive functions, and 'flat' or lack of emotions.