Disrupted Information Flow in Resting-State in Adolescents With Sports Related Concussion

Children and youths are at a greater risk of concussions than adults, and once injured, take longer to recover. A key feature of concussion is an increase in functional connectivity, yet it remains unclear how changes in functional connectivity relate to the patterns of information flow within resting state networks following concussion and how these relate to brain function. We applied a data-driven measure of directed effective brain connectivity to compare the patterns of information flow in healthy adolescents and adolescents with subacute concussion during the resting state condition. Data from 32 healthy adolescents (mean age =16 years) and 21 concussed adolescents (mean age = 15 years) within 1 week of injury were included in the study. Five minutes of resting state data EEG were collected while participants sat quietly with their eyes closed. We applied the information flow rate to measure the transfer of information between the EEG time series of each individual at different source locations, and therefore between different brain regions. Based on the ensemble means of the magnitude of normalized information flow rate, our analysis shows that the dominant nexus of information flow in healthy adolescents is primarily left lateralized and anterior-centric, characterized by strong bidirectional information exchange between the frontal regions, and between the frontal and the central/temporal regions. In contrast, adolescents with concussion show distinct differences in information flow marked by a more left-right symmetrical, albeit still primarily anterior-centric, pattern of connections, diminished activity along the central-parietal midline axis, and the emergence of inter-hemispheric connections between the left and right frontal and the left and right temporal regions of the brain. We also find that the statistical distribution of the normalized information flow rates in each group (control and concussed) is significantly different. This paper is the first to describe the characteristics of the source space information flow and the effective connectivity patterns between brain regions in healthy adolescents in juxtaposition with the altered spatial pattern of information flow in adolescents with concussion, statistically quantifying the differences in the distribution of the information flow rate between the two populations. We hypothesize that the observed changes in information flow in the concussed group indicate functional reorganization of resting state networks in response to brain injury.