Brain. 2022 Jun 21:awac221. doi: 10.1093/brain/awac221. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
The underlying pathophysiology of paediatric mild traumatic brain injury and the time-course for biological recovery remains widely debated, with clinical care principally informed by subjective self-report. Similarly, clinical evidence indicate that adolescence is a risk factor for prolonged recovery, but the impact of age-at-injury on biomarkers has not been determined in large, homogeneous samples. The current study collected diffusion magnetic resonance imaging data in consecutively recruited patients (N = 203; 8-18 years old) and age and sex-matched healthy controls (N = 170) in a prospective cohort design. Patients were evaluated sub-acutely (1-11 days post-injury) as well as at four months post-injury (early-chronic phase). Healthy participants were evaluated at similar times to control for neurodevelopment and practice effects. Clinical findings indicated persistent symptoms at four months for a significant minority of patients (22%), along with residual executive dysfunction and verbal memory deficits. Results indicated increased fractional anisotropy and reduced mean diffusivity for patients, with abnormalities persisting up to four months post-injury. Multicompartmental geometric models indicated that estimates of intracellular volume fractions were increased in patients, whereas estimates of free water fractions were decreased. Critically, unique areas of white matter pathology (increased free water fractions or increased neurite dispersion) were observed when standard assumptions regarding parallel diffusivity were altered in multicompartmental models to be more biologically plausible. Cross-validation analyses indicated that some diffusion findings were more reproducible when approximately 70% of the total sample (142 patients, 119 controls) were used in analyses, highlighting the need for large-sample sizes to detect abnormalities. Supervised machine learning approaches (random forests) indicated that diffusion abnormalities increased overall diagnostic accuracy (patients vs. controls) by approximately 10% after controlling for current clinical gold standards, with each diffusion metric accounting for only a few unique percentage points. In summary, current results suggest that novel multicompartmental models are more sensitive to paediatric mild traumatic brain injury pathology, and that this sensitivity is increased when using parameters that more accurately reflect diffusion in healthy tissue. Results also suggest that diffusion data may be insufficient to achieve a high degree of objective diagnostic accuracy in patients when used in isolation, which is to be expected given known heterogeneities in pathophysiology, mechanism of injury, and even criteria for diagnoses. Finally, current results suggest ongoing clinical and physiological recovery at four months post-injury.
PMID:35727944 | DOI:10.1093/brain/awac221
