Dec 1, 2021Identifying Children at Risk for Post-Concussion Symptoms
Researchers at the University at Buffalo Concussion Management Clinic in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences have developed a decision rule using a brief, standardized physical exam for sport-related concussive brain injuries in children and adolescents that can readily identify who is at risk for persistent post-concussion symptoms (PPCS).
The research was described in a paper published Sept. 11 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
A decision rule is an evidence-based tool that helps clinicians make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. In the study, the decision rule proved to be highly accurate, correctly identifying who would go on to develop PPCS in 85 percent of cases.
“The Buffalo Concussion Physical Exam takes less than 10 minutes to do and uses physician exam techniques that every clinician already has,” said Mohammad Nadir Haider, MD, Ph.D., research assistant professor of orthopedics and the paper’s first author.
To promote the adoption of the Buffalo Concussion Physical Exam, Haider, assistant director of research at the UB Concussion Management Clinic and UBMD Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine, plans next to develop an app that can generate the RDR score identifying children who will experience delayed recovery based on the findings from the exam.
Children and adolescents tend to take longer to recover from concussions than adults. Still, for the majority of those who experience a concussion, symptoms will resolve within a month or less without any treatment.
For that reason, it is standard practice to wait a few weeks to see if symptoms resolve on their own before patients are referred for treatment. But as many as a third of concussed patients will experience PPCS and require focused treatment.
“The current standard of practice is to wait-and-see for the first few weeks,” Haider says. “But our research and other studies have shown that in children and adolescents, delayed treatment can lead to a higher risk of persistent impairments with poor outcomes.”
Students with PPCS continue to suffer, experience physical and cognitive symptoms, and start exhibiting difficulties with academic work and even in their social lives, Haider says. “So, preventing these negative outcomes is pretty important.”
“Right now, there is no gold standard method to identify children within a few days of injury who will have delayed recovery from their concussion. The current standard of practice is to see which children do not recover, and this leads to unnecessary delays,” Haider continues. “This scoring system may circumvent the waiting period for those children at higher risk, expediting the treatment they need for a full recovery.”
The new decision rule is based on an observational study conducted from 2016 to 2019 on 270 children and adolescents with sports-related concussions who were seen within 14 days of injury at UBMD Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine clinics in Western New York.
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Participants were aged 8-18 and 38 percent were female. They were followed until they had recovered from their concussion and were cleared to return to school or sports without restrictions.
“The purpose was to identify what is predictive of delayed recovery in children and adolescents with a concussion,” Haider says. “We wanted to develop something very straightforward that any provider, from a school nurse to a medical resident to a primary care provider, could easily do.”
