Severity of military traumatic brain injury influences caregiver health-related quality of life.

Thirty caregivers is a small sample, and the injury severity groups had 11, 10, and 9 caregivers. The authors said formal comparisons were not meaningful because the sample was very small and underpowered. For some service members, medical records did not clearly show injury severity, so they were placed in an equivocal group rather than mild, moderate, severe, or penetrating. The severe group had mostly non-spouse caregivers, while the mild and equivocal groups had mostly spouse caregivers, so caregiver role may explain some differences. The study did not have enough data to separate spouse and non-spouse experiences. Some focus group speech was lost because multiple participants spoke at once and could not be attributed. The paper is qualitative, so it reports themes and descriptive percentages, not treatment effects.

No conflicts of interest were declared. The work was primarily supported by the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, with support from the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Nursing Research grant R01NR013658 and the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital.

Do not conclude that moderate, severe, or penetrating injury directly causes worse caregiver quality of life. The study was qualitative, the groups were very small, and the authors said formal comparisons were not meaningful. The severe group also had mostly non-spouse caregivers, while the mild group had mostly spouse caregivers, so the caregiver role may explain part of the pattern.