Gender differences in nonlinear motor performance following concussion

What is it about?

Healthy individuals are characterized by complex processes. This complexity reflects inter-connections in the neurological systems required to produce some kind of output, including heart beat patterns, postural sway, and isometric force. In this study, we show that individuals with a history of past concussions have reduced indices of complexity (sample entropy, average spectral power) when tracing a straight line using using isometric finger force. Additionally, this task has clear gender effects, where women show marked reductions in complexity with multiple concussions (compared to individuals with no history of concussion) and men show limited differences across concussion history. Thus women may be more susceptible to visual-motor deficits than men following concussion.

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Why is it important?

The individuals in this study were asymptomatic and more than 6 months out from their most recent concussion. However, this task and these less-traditional metrics identified differences between individuals with and without a history of concussion, when accounting for gender. Such reductions suggest that there are persistent alterations in the ways in which individuals utilize visual information to guide motor behavior that do not recover on the generally accepted clinical time course for concussion.