Correlates and predictors of resilience in veterans with persistent traumatic brain injury symptoms

PURPOSE: To understand the relationships between resilience and socio-demographic, clinical, cognitive, and affective variables in veterans with persistent traumatic brain injury (TBI) symptoms, and to identify and estimate the value of resilience predictors. METHODS: A total of 146 veterans with remote TBI were enrolled into a cross-sectional study. Correlational analysis was used to examine associations between variables. Multiple regression analysis was used to determine the most valuable predictors of resilience. RESULTS: Resilience was correlated with neurobehavioral symptoms of TBI, post-traumatic stress symptoms, quality of life, cognitive performance, and positive affect. There were no significant correlations with socio-demographic variables, TBI characteristics, depression, anxiety, and negative affect. Multiple linear regression showed that cognitive performance and positive affect were the most valuable predictors, followed by neurobehavioral symptoms and post-traumatic stress. CONCLUSIONS: Resilience in veterans with TBI has a strong correlation with persistent neurobehavioral symptoms, posttraumatic stress, quality of life, cognitive functioning, and positive affect. Such variables as good cognitive performance and positive affect were found to be more valuable for effective resilience in veterans with persistent TBI symptoms (possibly as protective factors) than clinical type of traumatic brain injury, the amount or the time that had passed since their last trauma and can explain the great amount of resilience variance even after excluding all other variables. Unlike many other factors, these variables can be modified. Targeting them in specific interventions will possibly cultivate resilience.