Traumatic brain injury (TBI)

Povzetek

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) often has long-term or life-long
cognitive, behavioural, and emotional consequences that lead to
severe drop in the overall quality of a patient’s life and everyday
functioning. In that sense, TBI represents one of the critical
issues in global public health and is opening a myriad of global
socio-economic questions (1, 2). While there is a substantial
body of work that investigates predictors of cognitive recovery
on one hand, there is still very much unknown about protective
factors of optimal recovery. There is also growing evidence that
certain patients with mild TBI experience diverse prolonged
symptoms months or years after the injury, while certain patients
with moderate or even severe TBI can fully recover after the
injury (3, 4). Variability in recovery is also present in a group of
patients with the same degree of TBI severity (5, 6). That kind of
data shows that investigating additional factors that could predict
optimal recovery after TBI is still needed. In recent years, to find
one such variable, researchers started investigating the role of
cognitive reserve (CR) in predicting recovery from TBI (7, 8).