Concussions have no impact on children’s IQ, Canadian study finds | 24CA News
A University of Calgary-led examine has some constructive news for fogeys whose youngsters have suffered concussions, discovering children’ intelligence isn’t affected by the mind damage.
The analysis, printed within the medical journal Pediatrics on Monday, is drawn from emergency room visits to U.S. and Canadian youngsters’s hospitals.
“Parents are always asking ‘what’s going to happen to my kid?’ There’s a lot of worry out there right now,” mentioned Dr. Keith Yeates, a professor within the college’s psychology division and senior writer of the Pediatrics paper.
“People are really worried about concussion and it is nice to be able to give parents some good news, in that there doesn’t appear to be an alteration in a kid’s IQ or intellectual ability as a consequence of these injuries.”
Yeates is an professional on the outcomes of childhood mind issues, together with concussion and traumatic mind damage. He was concerned in two earlier research that offered the information for the most recent analysis.
“We included IQ tests because they are a pretty standard outcome and we wanted to be able to describe our sample and we realized, ‘Jeez, we can actually address this and put the concern to bed a bit.”’
The examine in contrast 566 youngsters identified with concussion to 300 with orthopedic accidents, or these to the musculoskeletal system. The youngsters ranged in age from eight to 16 they usually had been recruited from the 2 earlier research.
The youngsters with orthopedic accidents had been included as a comparability group to think about different variables which may have an effect on IQ, corresponding to demographic background and experiences with trauma and ache.
The Canadian information was collected from youngsters’s hospitals’ emergency rooms in Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa and Montreal between 2016 and 2019.
In the Canadian hospitals, sufferers accomplished IQ checks three months after their accidents.
The U.S. cohort was studied at two youngsters’s hospitals in Ohio, the place sufferers accomplished IQ checks three to 18 days post-injury.
Yeates mentioned these within the examine had been typically not hospitalized, nor would there be any signal of damage with imaging of the mind.
But they’re accidents nonetheless, Yeates mentioned.
“These concussions are the sorts of injuries that athletes get, that everyday people get by slipping on the ice and falling and hitting their head,” he mentioned.
“It’s not that concussion has no negative effects. But it didn’t effect IQ, even when many of them were still struggling with a number of the issues that can occur from concussion.”
Yeates mentioned a concussion is completely different than extreme or average traumatic mind damage, which might decrease somebody’s IQ.
© 2023 The Canadian Press
