Relationship Between Post-Concussion Headache and Neuropsychological Test Perforamance in High School Athletes In the United States, approximately seven million high school and collegiate athletes

The relevance of headache to outcome following sports concussion is poorly understood and no studies exist examining this issue. The current study was conducted to investigate whether postconcussion headaches are associated with neurocognitive deficits and/or presence of other postconcussion symptoms at approximately one-week post injury. Study participants included 110 high school athletes who sustained concussion. Concussed athletes were divided into two groups, those reporting no headache at approximately day 7 post-injury and those reporting headaches. Dependent measures included symptom and neurocognitive test results collected via ImPACT, a computerized neuropsychological test battery. Groups were compared across both cognitive and symptom domains as well to the presentation of on-field markers of concussion severity at the time of injury. Results suggest that athletes reporting post-traumatic headache demonstrated significantly worse performance on Reaction Time (p < .001) and Memory (p < .02) cognitive composite scores as compared to athletes not reporting headache. These athletes also reported significantly more symptoms other than headache (p < .001) and were more likely to have demonstrated on-field anterograde amnesia (X = 4.2, p = .04). Our study suggests that any degree of post-concussion headache in high school athletes is likely associated with an incomplete recovery following concussion.