Executive Functioning Neuropsychological Testing of Veterans Diagnosed with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

This research was designed to determine if veterans with mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) show neuropsychological deficits in any of a number of areas (e.g., executive functions, memory). Independent groups, mild TBI (n=57) and control (n=57), were administered seven measures of cognitive functioning, five that are associated with executive processes and two that are associated with potential global dysfunction. Participants also completed four other psychological measures to gain information on aspects such as depressive symptoms, combat exposure, effort, and self-awareness of deficits. Demographic data such as age, ethnicity, marital status, and medications was also gathered. It was anticipated that the mild TBI group administration results would be worse on the executive measures and about the same or better than that of the control group on the other measures. Mild TBI group performed significantly worse on all of the 11 executive functions measurements except Category Fluency (p = .077), after controlling for Age, Depression, Word Memory Test scores, and Combat Exposure. Curiously, the Mild TBI group performed significantly poorer on all of the three non-executive neuropsychological measurements. Post hoc analysis, adding the non-executive tasks to the covariates, rendered two of the variables (Rey Immediate Recall and Rey Copy Time) no longer significant. The majority of mild TBI participants had good insight and awareness of the extent of their deficits (Mean = 4.9, SD = 2.86). Although technically the mild TBI scored more in the poor effort direction on each of the tests (sign test, p = .016), only one of the differences, for Multiple Choice, proved to be significant, and this difference accounted for only 4% of the variance.