Quantitative EEG Significantly and Clinically Differentiates Acute Mild TBI Patients From Matched Neurotypical Controls: Power Spectral and Connectivity Analyses

Concussive head injuries result in not only coup–contrecoup trauma to neurological tissue at injury sites but also a mechanical shearing of neurological pathways throughout the brain. Unfortunately, however, the diagnosis of concussion has long been based largely on self-reports of overt symptoms and virtually never includes an assessment of involved neurological tissues and pathways. This deficiency then leads to premature return to play or duty, to the risk of subsequent neurological reinjury and, in worse cases, to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. We offer here a test of quantitative EEG (qEEG) as a convenient, low-cost remedy to this problem in the evaluation of acute head injury in 19 diagnosed concussion patients matched to neurotypical controls. Results of qEEG indicate numerous Brodmann area functional clusters of highly significant and very large effect sizes in the differentiation of these two groups in EEG connectivity measures of coherence and phase difference. These findings indicate that qEEG can be used as a “hard” neurological measure of traumatic brain injury that directly assesses this neuronal shearing process as well as direct tissue injury and may offer an essential biomarker of readiness to return to play or duty and the avoidance of subsequent retraumatization of the brain.