Concussion

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), or concussion, is the result of a minor head injury. This potentially results in neural alterations which can cause long-term cognitive impairment, known as post-concussive syndrome. Many patients are admitted to the emergency departments every year for a mTBI, while less than half of them receive a prescription for a brain scan, bedrest or pharmacological treatment, and the majority are sent home without follow-up, emphasizing the lack of appropriate care provided following head injury.

A recent advancement in the field has highlighted the causal role of mTBI on cognitive impairment, but only a few studies investigated the impact of a concussion on (motor) learning. Patients, often students, present various motor deficits such as slower reaction time, longer preparation time to perform a task (Zahn and Mirsky 1999) or reduced movement velocity (De Beaumont et al. 2009). The underlying mechanism of motor learning deficits after concussion is a novel field that merits exploration. The rationale behind this is that mTBI is associated with sleep disturbances (Gosselin et al. 2009), and sleep is crucial for memory consolidation. Recently, a link between poor sleep quality following a concussion and both greater symptom severity and longer recovery time has been demonstrated both in adults and pediatric populations (Bramley et al. 2017; Chung et al. 2019). Yet the impact of sleep on motor memory consolidation following a brain injury is simply unexplored in the current literature. Dr. Aurore Thibaut (co-director of the Coma Science Group) and her team aim to study how sleep can influence functional and cognitive recovery of young adults who have suffered from a concussion.