engleski

The Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test and Memory Assessment in Rehabilitation of Persons after TBI

Objective: The main objective of this study is to validate the Croatian translation of RBMT on patients with TBI, especially to investigate discriminative characteristics, concurrent validity, and validity of levels of memory functioning. Materials and Method: RBMT was administered to 32 patients with moderate to mild TBI(PTA varies from a couple of seconds to 24 hours), mainly inpatients on orthopaedic rehabilitation ward. Group mean age was M=22, 31(sd=3, 89). RBMT were also administered to 39 patients with severe TBI (PTA was 2 to 20 weeks) inpatients on neurological rehabilitation ward . Group average age was M=21, 82 (sd=5, 05). All 71 subjects suffered TBI due to traffic road accident. Results on RBMT were scored as Profile Score with range from 0 to 24. To the group with severe TBI, we administered also three other tests of memory to investigate concurrent validity. For the group with mild to moderate TBI tests were administered one month after the traumatic event, and for a group with severe TBI three months after the accident. To validate four categories of level of memory functioning we split our group with severe TBI into 5 subgroups according to the time of recovery from the end of PTA to a testing session, so the patients in one of the subgroups were still in PTA. Assuming that PTA is recovered gradually, hypothesis was that severity of memory deficit measured by the level of memory function decrease gradually with the time of recovery. It is also worth to mention that patients who were tested in the later phases of recovery had a less severe injury or shorter PTA. Results: For mild to moderate TBI results range was from 17 to 24 with only 7 various scores. As in terms of the level of memory function, 69% of subjects with mild to moderate TBI had normal memory and 31% had a poor memory, which means that none of the subjects from that group had severe or moderate memory impairment as measured by RBMT. For the group with severe TBI, results were more variable, and results range from 0 to 24.Indexes of variability clearly showed that RBMT is not discriminative as a measure of memory deficits for subjects with mild to moderate TBI. All correlation coefficients between RBMT and three other measures of memory were significant at 0.001 level and the strongest correlation was between RBMT and WMS. The relationship between four levels of memory function on RBMT and five categories of recovery from PTA was significant (Contingency Coefficient=0.788 p<0.0001) which means that levels of memory functioning are strongly related to the severity of memory deficit. As we may see, all patients who were still in PTA had severe memory problems on RBMT, and also patients with the longest time of recovery from PTA are all in the category of normal memory on RBMT. Conclusions: 1. RBMT is not discriminative test for memory impairment for the group of subjects with mild TBI one month after the accident. 2. In the group with severe TBI RBMT shows a strong relationship with all three tests of memory. 3. The categories of memory impairment are related to the severity of memory deficit.

memory assessment ; traumatic brain injury

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