Psychological consequences of blunt head injury

89 severely closed head injured cases were tested on measures of verbal learning, and verbal and nonverbal intelligence, and their performance was compared with that of 30 orthopaedic cases. Head injured cases had severe deficits on all the tests. Severity of injury (judged by post-traumatic amnesia duration) was significantly related to poor performance on the learning and nonverbal intelligence tests, but not on the verbal intelligence test. The effect of injury on the family was studied in a further group of 35 head injured cases, showing that family burden within six months of injury was related to the presence of childish behaviour and loss of interest in the patient, together with other behavioural and affective changes. Physical deficits were not significant in this respect.