All procedures were approved by the Human Research Ethical Committee of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Informed consent was obtained from the patients and controls. Initially, we analysed if patients who underwent the neuropsychological evaluation were comparable with the eligible patients, who were not evaluated (dropout cases) according to their clinical, demographic, and hospitalization variables. Categorical variables were analysed using chi-square, continuous variables by

Mann–Whitney tests. The neuropsychological performance of patients and control participants was compared by the Mann–Whitney U test to identify the cognitive domains affected by TBI. Holm’s sequential rejection procedure (Holm, 1979) was applied

to counteract the problem of multiple comparisons, and p < 0.01 was considered statistically significant. selleck kinase inhibitor A univariate analysis was performed to investigate the association between the performances of patients on each neuropsychological test (dependent variables) and their clinical, demographic, and hospitalization variables (independent variables). The association Selleck PLX4032 among the neuropsychological tests and age and education (both in years) at the time point of TBI was investigated by linear regression. Normality ifenprodil of the distribution was determined by the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. The association between the demographic clinical, laboratory, neurosurgical, and neuroradiological variables from the acute TBI phase and the neuropsychological tests was performed by Student’s t-test or analysis of variance (ANOVA). The independent variables that showed an association with the neuropsychological tests (dependent variables) in the univariate analysis with a p level of significance lower

than .20 were included in a linear multiple regression analysis. This analysis was performed to identify the demographic, clinical, laboratory, neurosurgical, and neuroradiological variables that could be considered good predictors for each cognitive test performance later after the TBI. In this analysis, the independent continuous variables were considered covariates. Categorical variables were included in the model classified as 0 or 1 (for dichotomous) and 0, 1, or 2 for those showing three categories. Because a previous work (Senathi-Raja, Ponsford, & Schonberger, 2010) demonstrated that after maximum spontaneous recovery from TBI, poorer cognitive functioning may be independently associated with the increased time after injury, we also included in the regression analysis the time (in years) of cognitive evaluation after the occurrence of TBI.