Abstract
The effect of rehabilitation in pediatric acquired brain injury (ABI) is often discussed. The aim of this study was to identify clinical recovery after ABI in children where such recovery was better than in adults due to the child-brain’s plasticity and development. The main disorders of pediatric ABI are traumatic brain injury (TBI), acute encephalopathy, hypoxic encephalopathy and cerebro-vascular accident (CVA). In this study, I discuss TBI cases and CVA cases because they are typical neurosurgical disorders.
We enrolled patients who sustained injury and were younger than 16 years. I discuss TBI in 210 cases and CVA in 71 cases (bleeding 42 cases, infarction 29 cases). We collected data on 3 parameters : etiology, functional disturbance and prognosis.
The etiology of TBI was traffic accident 151 cases, abuse 29 cases, etc. The functional disturbance after TBI was physical disability in 109 cases, mental disability in 100 cases, higher brain dysfunction in 167 cases and epilepsy in 54 cases. It is important to note that the prognosis was the worst in abuse, followed by traffic accident to a lesser degree. The etiology of intracranial bleeding was mainly rupture of an arteriovenous malformation, and that of infarction was primarily complications of TBI, intracranial vessel abnormalites and complications of some sort of operation. The functional disturbances after CVA were physical disability in 64 cases, mental disability in 22 cases, higher brain dysfunction in 57 cases and epilepsy in 11 cases. The prognosis was slightly worse in infarction than in bleeding.
I discussed the effect of pediatric rehabilitation after ABI.
