This study demonstrates residual mental deficits in patients who have apparently recovered after closed head injury. Twenty closed head injury patients were compared to 20 normal control subjects matched for age, sex, handedness, education, language, and IQ. All received a series of neuropsychological tests. Discriminant function analysis significantly differentiated the two groups. Correct classification of individuals as having suffered a head injury or not was 85%. The head injury patients did have primary impairment on tests of divided attention. Litigation was not a factor. We propose that this impairment of information processing reflects residual brain damage secondary to the closed head injury.
Patients with myotonic dystrophy (MD) were compared to a control group, matched to the patients in important demographic variables including IQ, on the Sternberg Memory Scanning procedure, to investigate the hypothesis of a selective change in speed of information processing in MD patients. The neuropsychological functioning of these MD patients was also compared to normative data to provide a descriptive picture of their abilities; these results were correlated to the factors of age of onset and duration of the disease. Finally, the MD patients were also compared to the defined control group on the neuropsychological measures. There was little evidence of selective slowness of information processing or particular deficit independent of overall IQ. Neuropsychologically, the MD patients as a group performed at the low average level. There was, however, a wide range of abilities, suggesting that MD patients are not a unitary group in terms of neuropsychological functioning. Age of onset of the disease was important, at least for certain results. Further research of the neuropsychological functioning of MD patients must account for the wide range of results, with more precise measures of actual onset of the disease and muscular weakness, in a longitudinal evaluation.
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