Recovery versus retest effects in attention after closed head injury

Recovery in 60 patients with a closed-head injury (CHI) in the first year posttrauma was assessed repeatedly with a series of attention tests. A matched group of healthy subjects was tested at the same intervals to allow us to control for practice effects. The results of a multilevel analysis for longitudinal data show retest effects in all but one of the tests. Patients performed more poorly on all tests, but their results on each test appeared to show recovery over time. The indicator of recovery was an improvement in test performance that was greater than the retest effect shown by the controls. On most tests, the performance of the more severely injured patients was initially worse, but showed more recovery over time. Test results differed with respect to changes over time, sensitivity to severity of injury, and subject specific characteristics like age and vocational level. Recovery rate was not related to age or vocational status. Despite their recovery, the patient group was still impaired 1 year posttrauma on all tests sensitive to mental slowness. Outcome after 1 year, scored on a modified Glasgow Outcome Scale, was predicted to a small extent by PTA duration and initial performance on the RT-Distraction task. Return to work 2 to 5 years posttrauma was predicted by initial performance and improvement over time on the Stroop Color Word Test.