Regeneration of Intellectual Functions Following Closed Brain Injury: Follow-up Study on a Pair of Twins using the Co-twin as Control

Abstract

Neurological and especially intellectual sequelae of brain injuries in children are difficult to evaluate even in prospective studies as pretraumatic personality features and psychoreactive consequences interact with direct effects of the traumatic insult. Uniformity of genetic, of social, and in the ideal case of educational influences in monozygotic twins offers a chance to visualize these traumatic effects on a child’s development. Following these considerations, a surprising concordance among both twins, brain-damaged and control, was demonstrated by DENCKER [4] in a retrospective study on 36 monozygotic pairs. EEG, psychometric intelligence, and social behavior agreed to such an extent that most of the remaining differences proved pretraumatic.