Background: The aim of the study was to evaluate the possible significant role of some clinical factors in predicting cognitive outcome in a group of severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients, with Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) lower than 8 and duration of unconsciousness for at least 15 days (prolonged coma).
Method: A consecutive sample of 25 survivors of severe TBI attending the Physical and Cognitive Rehabilitation program participated in this study. The neuropsychological test battery included: Word-list Learning, Prose recall, Rey Figure Delayed recall, Word fluency, Raven's Progressive Matrices' 47. The clinical variables evaluated in correlation with the neuropsychological outcome were the following: age, duration of unconsciousness, duration of post-traumatic amnesia, interval from head trauma to neuropsychological evaluation, interval from head trauma to recovery of oral feeding, and finally interval from head trauma to first verbal communication.
Findings: The clinical variable with a significant predictive value on most neuropsychological scores was the interval from head trauma to the recovery of oral feeding.
Conclusions: If this result is confirmed in larger samples, time interval of oral feeding recovery from head trauma should be considered as a possible predictor of neuropsychological outcome in TBI patients with prolonged coma.
Copyright 2004 Springer-Verlag