Symptom Recovery Found to Take Much Longer After Certain Concussions

If there’s one thing worse than having a concussion, it’s having a previous one. Young people who had a prior concussion took twice as long (median: 24 days vs. 12 days) to get over their symptoms compared with peers who had not had a previous concussion, noted Matthew Eisenberg, M.D., of Boston Children’s Hospital, and colleagues, online June 10 in Pediatrics. The researchers studied 280 children and adolescents with an acute concussion, aged 11 to 22, seen in the emergency department.

For those with more than one previous concussion, it took 28 days to resolve symptoms, and 35 days for those who experienced another concussion within the prior year. Children with only a single prior concussion that occurred more than a year before the study had the same risk as those who had not experienced a concussion. They also found that symptoms lasted longer in children aged 13 and older, which they thought might reflect either differences in neurobiology or more severe injuries from contact sports played by older children.

The results, said the authors, suggest that “. . . sufficient time to recover from a concussion may improve long-term outcomes.”

Read more about concussion and its relationship to traumatic brain injury in Psychiatric News here. Also see the Journal of Neuropsychiatry here.

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