Jéssica Natuline Ianof*, Renato Teodoro Ramos, Luís Fernando Hindi Basile, Ricardo Nitrini and Renato Anghinah
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is caused by an external mechanical force. The most common causes of TBI are car crash, falls, assaults and thefts and accidents during recreational activity. The acceleration-deceleration mechanism responsible for DAI, often damage the lateral and ventral regions of the frontal and temporal lobes. Deficits in attention and memory, difficulty in learning new information, solving problems and planning are common sequelae. Impulsivity and lack of self-control are also common after a TBI. Our goal was to correlate functional changes obtained in the electroencephalogram (EEG) with the cognitive decline in diffuse axonal injury (DAI) and understand the pathophysiology of this injury. Ten patients with diffuse axonal lesion and 5 control subjects were recruited by the Group of Cognitive Rehabilitation after TBI in the Division of Neurology, Clinics Hospital, Faculty of Medicine, University of São Paulo. A high-resolution EEG with 128 channels were performed at the Psychiatry Institute (LIM-23), University of São Paulo. The cortical sources of EEG rhythms were estimated by analysis of low resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (LORETA), which revealed that patients with DAI had reduced alpha activity and increased theta activity, indicating a slowing of brain activity. In contrast, control subjects showed a predominance of alpha activity and hippocampal activation during the exam, which was not observed in the group with DAI. The DAI patients showed reduced brain activity and little or no hippocampal activation, which is consistent with memory complaints presented by these patients.
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