IQ TESTING AFTER BRAIN INJURY

Neuropsychology IQ

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) an estimated 1.6-3.8 million sports and recreation related concussions occur in the U.S. each year. Concussions occur even if an athlete doesn’t lose consciousness and in fact, is the most common type of brain injury sustained in sports.

A concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by a blow or jolt to the head. The severity of an injury can range from mild to severe. Signs and symptoms may be noticeable immediately, or it may take days or weeks before they are present.

Symptoms and recovery vary for each person, but awareness and seeking medical attention immediately following an incident are crucial steps in caring for yourself, a teammate, or family member.

Normal IQ Often, upon request, naive psychologists will examine a head injured person on a traditional battery of intelligence tests, find that the IQ (the numerical average of the many subtest scores) is in the average range, and then pronounce the client "cognitively recovered", or "capable of functioning intellectually in the average range."

This myth is dangerous because it can seriously misrepresent the client's deficits, and create unrealistic expectations in the minds of others that set the client up for serious failure. The conclusion is a myth for three reasons.

First, an IQ score is a composite of many different scores. An overall IQ score can mask severe variability among performance levels; the person in the "average range of IQ" can be performing in the superior range on some tasks, but be severely impaired on others.

Head injured persons who can perform quite well on such tests may have such breakdowns in learning, memory, and especially executive functions (planning, organizing, self-monitoring) in the unstructured real world that they are totally unable to function. "Average range IQ" and even higher IQ scores should never be the basis for concluding that a client is cognitively intact, and therefore ready to handle mental stresses of the real world.