Brain injury : [BI]
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Brain injury : [BI] · Jul 2003
Problem-solving by traumatically brain injured and neurologically intact subjects on an adaptation of the twenty questions test.
RAPS (Rapid Assessment of Problem-Solving) is a clinical measure for assessing verbal problem-solving in hard-to-test patients or those that may not be able to tolerate a longer, more detailed assessment. The design of the test is based on Mosher and Hornsby's Twenty Question test, but RAPS contains several modifications to facilitate its use with brain-injured individuals. This study used RAPS to compare the verbal problem-solving ability of subjects that were neurologically intact and subjects that had chronic traumatic brain injuries. ⋯ Two meta-cognitive functions, planning and strategy shifting, appeared to explain most of the differences in the verbal problem-solving performance between the groups. Both groups, however, demonstrated a range of abilities on RAPS. Until a larger normative database for RAPS is available, it behooves clinicians using the test to analyse results on an individual basis, to consider the subject's pre-morbid problem-solving ability and to weigh those factors associated with brain injury that could affect RAPS performance.
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Brain injury : [BI] · Jul 2003
The relationship between pre-hospital and emergency department Glasgow coma scale scores.
Pre-hospital GCS scores are used to make critical patient care decisions and to fill in gaps in hospital-based TBI surveillance, but they may not be accurate. ⋯ EMS-GCS is usually two points lower than ED-GCS, but the correlation between them is strong and independent of the time between score determinations. These results could prevent unnecessary procedures based on the EMS-GCS and improve the accuracy of TBI surveillance.