Increased sensitivity to light is common after concussion. Viewing a flickering light can also produce uncomfortable somatic sensations like nausea or headache. We examined effects evoked by viewing a patterned, flickering screen in a cohort of 81 uninjured youth athletes and 84 concussed youth. We used Multiple correspondence analysis and identified two primary dimensions of variation: the presence or absence of visually evoked effects and variation in the tendency to manifest effects that localized to the eyes (e.g., eye watering) versus more generalized neurological effects (e.g., headache). Based on these two primary dimensions, we grouped participants into three categories of evoked symptomatology: no effects, eye-predominant effects, and brain-predominant effects. A similar proportion of participants reported eye-predominant effects in the uninjured (33.3%) and concussed (32.1%) groups. By contrast, participants who experienced brain-predominant effects were almost entirely from the concussed group (1.2% of uninjured, 35.7% of concussed). The presence of brain-predominant effects was associated with a higher concussion symptom burden and reduced performance on visio-vestibular tasks. Our findings indicate that the experience of negative constitutional, somatic sensations in response to a dynamic visual stimulus is a salient marker of concussion and is indicative of more severe concussion symptomatology. We speculate that differences in visually evoked effects reflect varying levels of activation of the trigeminal nociceptive system.
Keywords: biomarkers; pediatric brain injury; sensory function; traumatic brain injury.