• Darrin M Aase, Joseph M Babione, Eric Proescher, Justin E Greenstein, Julia A DiGangi, Christopher Schroth, Amy E Kennedy, Stacey Feeley, Michelle Tan, David Cosio, and K Luan Phan.
• Mental Health Service Line, Jesse Brown VA Medical Center, 820 S. Damen Ave., Chicago, IL 60612, USA; College of Health and Human Services, Governors State University, 1 University Parkway, University Park, IL 60484, USA; Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1747 Roosevelt Road, Chicago, IL 60608, USA. Electronic address: daase@govst.edu.
• Psychiatry Res. 2018 Oct 1; 268: 460-466.

AbstractPrior work suggested that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) worsens post-concussive symptoms (PCS), neuropsychological functioning, and pain-related outcomes in post-9/11 veterans. However, the impact of PTSD in the context of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is not entirely clear. We evaluated possible differences among veterans with deployment-related mTBI with and without PTSD, and a comparison group. We hypothesized that veterans with comorbid mTBI and PTSD would report more PCS, perform worse on neuropsychological tasks, and report greater pain intensity and maladaptive pain coping relative to those without PTSD. Ninety (15 female, 75 male) post-9/11 veterans completed measures of psychiatric functioning, PCS, deployment-related mTBI, pain intensity, pain coping, and a brief neuropsychological evaluation. Veterans with comorbid mTBI and PTSD reported significantly higher PCS across domains, and greater pain intensity and maladaptive coping. They also performed more poorly on measures of recall, but not on measures of attention, encoding, or executive functioning. Findings suggest that PTSD results in greater PCS in the context of mTBI, and is associated with greater pain catastrophizing, worse recall, greater pain intensity, and greater illness-focused coping than in mTBI alone. PCS symptoms, recall, and pain coping may be of clinical importance for post-9/11 veterans with the "polytrauma triad."Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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