Objective: To examine whether pediatric mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is associated with differences in neurocognitive functioning among children. Setting: Baseline data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Participants: Children with mTBI were compared to two control groups: children with orthopedic injury (OI) and children with no injury (NI). After excluding those with moderate/severe TBI, 450 children were classified as having mTBI, 1604 with OI, and 9814 with NI. Design: This is a cross-sectional analysis using the baseline data from a longitudinal observational study. Neurocognitive performance was assessed using task-based cognitive tests, including the National Institutes of Health Toolbox Cognition Battery (NIHTBX), Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, and the Little Man Task. Multiple imputation was used to address missing data. Linear regression models were used to compare cognitive performance across groups, adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity, parental income, parental education, and genetic ancestry. Main Measures: The primary outcomes include the principal component scores representing General Ability, Executive Function , and Learning/Memory . Results: Unadjusted analyses showed children with mTBI had significantly higher scores than NI children on all three principal components. However, no significant differences remained after adjusting for confounders. No differences were found between mTBI and OI groups. Sensitivity analyses further adjusting for behavior and white matter microstructure resulted in same findings. Conclusion: After adjusting for demographic and genetic factors, no significant differences were found between children with mTBI and OI/NI. The findings highlight the importance of accounting for demographic, socioeconomic, and genetic confounders, as well as selecting appropriate control groups, when analyzing cognitive differences of children with mTBI.
Meng et al. (Thu,) studied this question.