Loss of white matter connections after severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and its relationship to social cognition

Abstract

Adults with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) often suffer poor social cognition. Social cognition is complex, requiring verbal, non-verbal, auditory, visual and affective input and integration. While damage to focal temporal and frontal areas has been implicated in disorders of social cognition after TBI, the role of white matter pathology has not been examined. In this study 17 adults with chronic, severe TBI and 17 control participants underwent structural MRI scans and Diffusion Tensor Imaging. The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) was used to assess their ability to understand emotional states, thoughts, intentions and conversational meaning in everyday exchanges. Track-based spatial statistics were used to perform voxelwise analysis of Fractional Anisotropy (FA) and Mean Diffusivity (MD) of white matter tracts associated with poor social cognitive performance. FA suggested a wide range of tracts were implicated in poor TASIT performance including tracts known to mediate, auditory localisation (planum temporale) communication between nonverbal and verbal processes in general (corpus callosum) and in memory in particular (fornix) as well as tracts and structures associated with semantics and verbal recall (left temporal lobe and hippocampus), multimodal processing and integration (thalamus, external capsule, cerebellum) and with social cognition (orbitofrontal cortex, frontopolar cortex, right temporal lobe). Even when controlling for non-social cognition, the corpus callosum, fornix, bilateral thalamus, right external capsule and right temporal lobe remained significant contributors to social cognitive performance. This study highlights the importance of loss of white matter connectivity in producing complex social information processing deficits after TBI.

What Do You Have in Mind? Measures to Assess Mental State Reasoning in Neuropsychiatric Populations

“…The two forms are useful for counterbalancing in trials [e.g., Refs. (226, 227)] and the TASIT has been utilized in fMRI experiments (228, 229). Shorter versions are also sometimes used [e.g., Ref.…”

Default Mode Network Connectivity Predicts Emotion Recognition and Social Integration After Traumatic Brain Injury

“…For example, it has been proposed that increased connectivity arises as an indirect response to structural disruption (61, 67), reflecting neural communication through alternative (and less efficient) pathways due to degraded direct connections [(68, 69); see (70), for review]. In this light, increased within-DMN connectivity may reflect a neural (but not necessarily behavioral) compensation for reduced structural integrity, arising from injury or from natural variation in white matter (14, 71, 72).…”

“If I knew what I was doing on Twitter then I would use it more”: Twitter experiences and networks of people with traumatic brain injury (TBI)

“…TBI is most frequently associated with external trauma to the head resulting from traffic sporting accidents, trauma-related violence, and falls (Johnson & Griswold, 2017). The injury to the brain is complex and typically affects the person's frontal and temporal lobes, often resulting in diffuse white matter changes (McDonald, Dalton, Rushby, & Landin-Romero, 2018). When considering how young adults with TBI might engage with social media, it is important to recognise the several physical and cognitive impacts of TBI on their potential engagement in online communication (Brunner, Hemsley, Togher, & Palmer, 2017).…”