Brain Injury Group welcomes brain injury recovery review

The Brain Injury Group – a national network of specialist brain injury lawyers and support services – welcomes the recent review in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry that looks more closely at the differing rates of recovery from brain injury.

While the review requires more in-depth research before it is able to offer any conclusive views, it clearly shows the need for further work in this field.

Some people recover from concussion and acquired brain injury quite quickly while others show symptoms for far longer. There are many mitigating factors in a person’s recovery including the nature of their accident, their health and personality before their brain injury, and the social and welfare influences during their recovery. The review takes into account five categories of reasons that may explain why some people experience long-term problems after a concussion: their outlook; the effort they make to improve; the stress they are experiencing; their personal bias and the progress of any litigation regarding their injury which resulted in their concussion.

“This is a serious and refreshing article that is unusual in considering carefully the range of stresses that people are likely to be under after a ‘mild’ brain injury and the responses that one would expect,” says eminent neurologist Professor Lindsay McLellan, a consultant to the Brain Injury Group. “This is an important area to understand because the wrong diagnosis and treatment of these symptoms could do more harm than good,” he continues. “I completely agree with the paper’s caution that more care should be taken to obtain a full personal history, and better tests need to be developed, in order to ensure that people with continuing symptoms can be given more accurate information about what their symptoms really mean, and how they can best be helped,” he says.

A summary of the review in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry can be seen here