Apathy and mood disorders after Acquired Brain Injury: presentation of two research projects

This abstract is only referred to the first study presented in my Phd thesis: The diagnosis of apathy, one of the most common behavioral changes of Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), is important to improve clinical understanding and treatment of persons with ABI, and to decrease the degree of disability. The main aim of the study was to determine the possible role of apathy on conflict monitoring, by using choice reaction time tasks. We examined behavioral responses of conflict monitoring during three different Flanker tasks (each defined by a specific set of stimuli) in 5 severe ABI patients with diagnosis of apathy, 5 severe ABI patients without apathy and 15 healthy controls. The main result of the study was that the performance of patients with apathy was worse than that of healthy subjects, whereas patients without apathy showed slower reactions times in comparison both to healthy subjects and patients with apathy. Results also showed that only patients with apathy exhibited a significantly higher number of missing trials, suggesting that this clinical population may have had more difficulties in identifying the target stimuli, preferring a strategy of not reacting when they found more difficulties instead of taking more time to response. Our results may suggest a potential link between apathy following severe ABI and conflict monitoring processes, even though further investigations with larger sample size are needed.