A-03 Physical Therapy Compared to a Home Exercise Program for Protracted Pediatric Sport-Related Concussion Rehabilitation

Abstract

Abstract Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare the recovery time in days between protracted recovery (greater than or equal to 28 days since injury) patients who were prescribed physical therapy and those who were prescribed a home exercise program. We hypothesized that physical therapy would be associated with shorter recovery times relative to the home exercise program. Methods: The 159 participants (aged 8–18) were drawn from an ongoing study. This study was a retrospective cohort design of sports-related concussion patients with a protracted recovery who presented to an outpatient specialty concussion clinic between 2018 and 2021, with data collected from electronic medical records. Both prescribed physical therapy (PPT) and home exercise program (HEP) patients were provided vestibular/ocular motor rehabilitation exercises to be completed at home three times per day. PPT participants must have completed at least three PPT sessions, or they were excluded from the study. Multi-variable zero-truncated negative binomial regressions were used to evaluate associations between groups. Results: Among the 48 (30.2%) PPT and 111 (69.8%) HEP participants, the majority were female (57.9%), age was 15.3 ± 1.4 (PPT) and 14.2 ± 2.8 (HEP), and days to clinic was a median 6.0 (IQR = 3.0–27.0; PPT) and 7.0 (IQR = 3.0–23.0; HEP). After adjusting for demographic (age, sex) and clinical measures (concussion history, convergence, VOMS score, and days to clinic), PPT was associated with an additional 1.21 days (95% CI: 1.06, 1.39) than HEP. Conclusions: We unexpectedly found that PPT was not associated with a shorter recovery time relative to HEP. Future research should explore this hypothesis while aiming to evaluate the effect of PPT versus HEP using a randomized design.