To ensure clinically useful comparisons, patients were excluded from the study if they had less than 9 or more than 16 years of education. Altogether, 126 TBI patients met these criteria. These patients were referred by physicians (n = 55, 43.7%), case managers (n = 36, 28.6%), and attorneys (n = 35, 27.7%). Overall, the majority of patients (n = 106, 84.1%)

had some form of external incentive, Selleck Rapamycin usually in the form of workers’ compensation or pending personal litigation. Patients were considered to have suffered a mild TBI if they met the following criteria set by the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee of the Head Injury Interdisciplinary Special Interest Group of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine

(1993): (1) post-traumatic amnesia (PTA) not greater than 24 hours; (2) after 30 minutes, an initial Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) of 13 to 15; and, (3) loss of consciousness (LOC) of 30 minutes or less. Any patient who did not meet all of the mild TBI criteria was coded as moderate–severe TBI. Also, patients who met the mild TBI criteria, but had positive neuroradiological findings (skull fracture, haemorrhage, haematoma) or focal neurological signs (haemiplegia, anosmia), commonly referred to as ‘mild-complicated TBI’, were coded as moderate–severe TBI for this study. For purposes of this study, a patient was placed in the TBI group if they presented with or claimed to have had a head injury. The mild TBI criteria were used in this study to separate mild from moderate–severe cases, not to determine this website if a patient actually experienced MCE公司 a TBI. They were then classified as mild or moderate–severe

as described above. The details of their head injury claim were examined as part of the group classification process (see below). Thus, the mild TBI group contained only persons who clearly had no worse than a mild TBI and might have had no TBI, while the moderate–severe group contained a range of injury severities from mild-complicated to severe. Altogether, 77 patients were placed in the mild TBI group and 49 were classified as moderate–severe TBI patients. Demographic and injury-related characteristics are presented in Table 1. This group consisted of 75 patients with a variety of neurological and psychiatric diagnoses seen in the course of general neuropsychological practice. The most frequently observed diagnosis was cerebrovascular accident (CVA; n = 31, 41%). Other patients in this group were diagnosed with psychiatric conditions, dementia, seizure disorders, and other conditions. These patients were excluded if they were seen in a compensation-seeking context. See Table 1 for the diagnostic breakdown and demographic characteristics of this sample. TBI patients were categorized on the basis of Slick et al. (1999) criteria for malingered neurocognitive dysfunction (MND) using a diagnostic decision tree similar to one presented by Millis (2004).