Neuropsychological treatment of impulse control in traumatic frontal brain injury: a case study

Abstract

Patients with brain injury suffer cognitive, physical and emotional impairments that interfere with their everyday activities. However, behavioural problems such as aggressiveness and irritability affect the normal integration of the patient in the family, and in social and vocational contexts. Given this, it is important to add a functional assessment to the classical neuropsychological assessment, in order to identify the main difficulties and to guide the intervention. Traditionally, behavioural disabilities are associated with executive function impairments. The intervention implies the compensation and restitution of the function using a wide variety of tools and methodologies. The complexity of emotions is relevant to completely understand the executive functions. The present article reviews the main changes in cognitive, functional and behavioural abilities during neuropsychological rehabilitation. In this purpose, a neuropsychological evaluation was carried out to decide the objectives of the rehabilitation and a second evaluation aimed to investigate the treatment effects. The lenght of the rehabilitation program was 18 weeks, with two one-hour sessions per week. The results show a good recovery on behavioural and cognitive domains, what constitutes a higher evidence of the effectiveness of neuropsychological rehabilitation after traumatic brain injury.