NEW RESEARCH Neuroimaging Correlates of Novel Psychiatric Disorders After Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children and adolescents is a major public health problem. Psychiatric disorders are a common and important complication of pediatric TBI. Research has focused on understanding the risk factors for post-injury development of a general category of new-onset psychiatric disorders, called novel psychiatric disorders (NPD) , and specific psychiatric disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), personality change due to a general medical condition, and anxiety disorders 3, . The catch-all category, NPD, is important because new-onset disorders after pediatric TBI are typically heterogeneous, and repeated studies show they occur at a significantly higher rate than in children with orthopedic injury (OI) 2, . This study concentrates on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) correlates of the broad category of NPD in children who participated in a prospective longitudinal psychiatric interview study of pediatric TBI and OI.