Self-reported outcomes and patterns of service engagement after an acquired brain injury: a long-term follow-up study.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: To describe the clinical characteristics, self-reported outcomes in domains relating to activities of daily living and patterns of service engagement in the survivors of a moderate-to-severe acquired brain injury over seven years. RESEARCH DESIGN: A longitudinal research design was used. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Thirty-two individuals who sustained a moderate-to-severe acquired brain injury completed a Sociodemographic and Support Questionnaire at one (t1) and seven years (t2) after completing a publicly funded inpatient neurorehabilitation program. MAIN OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: There were minimal changes in independent living, mobility, ability to maintain key relationships and in return to work in the interval between t1 and t2. Sixty-nine percent of participants engaged with two or more allied health professional services and 75% engaged with support services in the community over the seven years. CONCLUSIONS: There were minimal additional gains in outcomes relating to activities of daily-living and there was a high level of service need in the first decade postinjury. Young and middle-aged individuals who sustain an ABI may continue to live in the community for decades with some level of disability and may require ongoing access to services.

Decreased frontal, striatal and cerebellar activation in adults with ADHD during an adaptive delay discounting task.

An important characteristic of childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a bias towards small immediate versus larger delayed rewards, but it is not known if this symptom is also a feature of adult ADHD. A delay-discounting task was administered to participants with adult ADHD and a comparison group in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants responded to a series of questions that required judgments between small sums of money available immediately and larger sums obtained after a temporal delay. Question parameters were adjusted by an adaptive algorithm designed to converge on each participant's discounting indifference point, an individual set point at which there is equal valuation of both choices. In all participants, robust task activation was observed in regions previously identified in functional imaging studies of delay discounting. However, adults with ADHD showed less task activation in a number of regions including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, superior frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate, caudate nucleus and declive of the cerebellum. Additionally, the degree to which a participant discounted delayed rewards was inversely related to task activation in the cerebellum. The results suggest that the bias towards immediate rewards in childhood ADHD may not persist behaviorally, but instead present in adulthood as alterations in frontostriatal and frontocerebellar networks.