Variability of the Behavioral Assessment Screening Tool for Mobile Health Using Ecological Momentary Assessment in Chronic Traumatic Brain Injury.
Lauren Terhorst, Shannon B Juengst
PMID 42326601WHAT IT FOUND
Prompting adults with chronic TBI daily, every other day or at random made no difference to how much their symptoms swung.
Day to day, fatigue varied most and substance misuse least, and people fell into three groups by how stable their reports were.
Key findings
01Whether adults with chronic TBI were asked to report symptoms once a day at a random time, once a day at a chosen time, or every other day at a chosen time made no statistically significant difference to how much their symptoms varied, on either measure of variability.
02Fatigue varied the most from one day to the next and substance misuse the least, while negative affect showed the highest within-person variability, seen in the group prompted at random times.
03People sorted into three groups by how variable their symptom reports were: 10 whose negative affect and substance misuse scores moved most, 16 whose executive dysfunction, fatigue and impulsivity scores moved most, and 18 whose scores were the steadiest across all five symptom areas.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The sample was homogeneous, mostly women (31 of 44) who had completed a postsecondary degree (75%), which the authors say limits how far the findings generalise. The sample was small (44), which the authors note is a particular concern for the cluster analysis; separation between the three clusters was only moderate. This is a secondary analysis of a feasibility study in 44 people who stayed with the diary. It was not designed or powered to show that the prompting schedules are equivalent, so finding no difference is not proof that they are the same. Substance misuse scores never changed for 30 of the 44 participants, so there was almost no variability to explain in that area. The three symptom-variability groups are exploratory and unreplicated; the authors say they should be used to generate hypotheses for larger studies.
Declared interests
The authors state they have no financial or nonfinancial disclosures to make in relation to this project. No funding source is named in the paper. The dataset and coding are posted publicly on the Open Science Framework.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the lack of a significant difference between prompting schedules as evidence that they are equivalent. With 44 participants this study was not built to test that, and it found no difference rather than equal results. Equally, do not treat the three symptom-variability groups as established patient types or use them to choose treatments; the authors present them as a hypothesis for larger studies, and they have not been replicated.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →