Attention and depressive symptoms in chronic phase after traumatic brain injury.

Objective: To study whether attention deficits differ between TBI (traumatic brain injury) patients with and without depressive symptoms.Method: The study group (n= 61, mean age = 59 years) consisted of symptomatic TBI patients injured on average 30 years earlier. They were studied with a broad range of attention tasks including computerized methods. The patients were divided into those with depressive symptoms (n= 32) and those without (n= 29), according to the short form of the Beck depression scale with a cut-off score of 5. In addition, a diagnosis of major depression was applied according to the Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN) (n= 6). The groups with depression or depressive symptoms were compared with the non-depressed TBI patients and with an age- and education-matched healthy control group (n= 31).Results: Cognitive methods that require flexibility (Trail making B, Card sorting, Word fluency) and working memory (Subtraction test) were sensitive to discriminate TBI patie...