Component analysis of verbal fluency in patients with mild traumatic brain injury

We set out to examine the sensitivity of switching and clustering component scores of verbal fluency in patients with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Clustering and switching scores were compared between patients with mTBI and healthy normal controls as well as those with moderate TBI and severe TBI. Fifty-four healthy controls along with 20 mild TBI, 8 moderate TBI, and 12 severe TBI patients were included in the study. Our findings demonstrate that component score effect sizes were larger than those of total words generated for both phonemic and semantic fluency. This pattern of finding held true regardless of comparison group. In addition, semantic fluency component scores were found to correspond to larger component score effect sizes than did phonemic fluency component scores. Our findings demonstrate that component scores derived from the Controlled Oral Word Association Test may be sufficient to reliably capture the effects of unremitting injury (i.e., more than 3 months post status) to the frontal and temporal brain as evinced in cases of unremitting mTBI. This differential pattern of performance provides preliminary evidence for the potential usefulness of switching and clustering in the assessment of mTBI. Given the small sample sizes employed in our study, however, future studies are needed to determine whether component measures of verbal fluency have discriminative ability.