Development of the pediatric test of brain injury.
OBJECTIVE
The Pediatric Test of Traumatic Brain Injury (PTBI) (currently in its research edition) is a tool for assessing the cognitive-linguistic skills of school-aged children and adolescents in acute care and rehabilitation settings after traumatic brain injury. Development of the PTBI was motivated by the fact that, to date, no standardized test has been available to assess the full range of cognitive-linguistic impairments associated with pediatric brain injury. In this article we describe how the research edition of the PTBI was developed, provide rationale for the areas of assessment, discuss a plan for standardization, and illustrate its use with three children with TBI.


METHODS
The PTBI was constructed to sample the attention, memory, language, reading, writing, metalinguistic, and metacognitive skills that are particularly at risk in pediatric brain injury and that are relevant to the general education curriculum.


METHODS
The test material for the PTBI was selected on the basis of clinical and experimental evidence that children and adolescents with TBI demonstrate a wide range of cognitive and language deficits. These first appear in the early stages of recovery and often persist but change over time.


CONCLUSIONS
Our goal is to standardize the PTBI so it can be used to establish baseline behaviors and track cognitive-linguistic recovery.
Hotz
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G
Department of Neurological Surgery, University of Miami School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, USA. ghotz@med.miami.edu
Helm-Estabrooks
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Nelson
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D000063:Accidents, Traffic; D000293:Adolescent; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000150:complications* / Q000175:diagnosis; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015601:Injury Severity Score; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology; D008297:Male; D009422:Nervous System Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology; D020557:Neurolinguistic Programming; D009460:Neurologic Examination / Q000379:methods*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010372:Pediatrics / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity