Children who sustained traumatic brain injuries may experience such psychological effects as anxiety, phobias and depression more than a decade later, researchers say. The anxiety may have many causes, including actual brain damage or the experience of living in an anxious family environment after the injury. “The study suggests that brain injury is in some way related to longer-term anxiety symptoms, while previously it was thought that brain injury only leads to short-term effects,” lead author Michelle Albicini said. Albicini’s team found that children with moderately severe brain injuries and girls and women in general were at greater risk for long-term psychological effects compared with boys and children who had milder brain injuries.
People with past brain injuries were also about four times as likely to suffer from panic attacks, specific phobias and depression. Those with moderate-severe brain injuries had the highest overall rates of anxiety disorders and were most likely to suffer from multiple anxiety disorders at once. However, women were four times as likely as men to have an anxiety disorder, regardless of whether they had a brain injury, the authors note.