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Mandira Banerjee: Hi! I am Mandira Banerjee from University of Michigan News Service, and today I am talking with Sarah Stoddard, a researcher in the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Stoddard and her colleagues just published research connecting head injury and violent behavior in youth.

Head injury is a huge public health problem and researchers are just starting to understand that how even a small bump in the head can cause lasting problems in the brain affecting cognition and behavior.

So Sarah, we've heard a lot in the news about traumatic brain injury, sustained while playing sports, so how does the study relate to that?

Sarah Stoddard: Our study really supports what other studies have said that links the history of head injury to later violence and violent behaviors. Our study was unique in that we really looked at the relationship between head injury and violence in a more general population of urban use in young adults.

So a lot of the other studies that have been done have focused on real specific populations like present populations or young people that really underwent significant kind of brain injury, but I think it's important that what we found isn't imperially unique to our study, where our study fits in the context of other people who've also looked at the relationship and the effects of head injury on behavior.

Mandira Banerjee: And you looked at young people living in Flint, which is urban city with high crime rate. So how do we know what comes first whether it's violence or head injury? I mean, can you explain how you are accounted for that and other factors in the study?

Sarah Stoddard: In our study, we couldn't definitively answer that question, but we did take several methodological steps to increase their confidence in their results. Some of the things we did was we did account for previous violent behavior. So if they told us they have been violent in the past, we were able to account for that. We also accounted for things like race and gender. We accounted for other risk factors that are known to be associated with violent behavior such as alcohol use, marijuana use, kind of other non-violent forms of delinquency.

So in our study even after accounting for all of those things, head injury still remained a significant predictor of violent behavior.

Mandira Banerjee: So how can we use these findings to then develop interventions of policies in schools or communities?

Sarah Stoddard: Our results really suggest that youth violence prevention which focuses on youth with head injury is maybe beneficial, regardless of how they sustained their head injury, whether that would be due to sports or a violent act or even a car accident. These interventions might focus on helping youth develop alternative strategies for problem-solving so they don't resort to violence as a way to deal with kind of problems or conflicts.

In addition, strategies to prevent head injury, for example, the development in youth of sports safety equipment, head-gear, helmets, those kinds of things, they are also critical.

Mandira Banerjee: What's the next step for this research?

Sarah Stoddard: One of the limitations in our study is that we use self-reported measures of head injuries, and we don't have any clinical data to provide any information about what the head injury was in the extent of the injury. Future research that describes the head injury in more detail to look at both the extent of the injury and how that might relate to violence.

So for example, a study that follows a sample of kind of healthy youth, their adolescence, before they have a head injury and then following them over time and monitoring if the head injury occurs how the head injury happened and then the impact of the head injury in the context of their life and how it's affected them. This would all help answer your previous question about which comes first; is it violence or is it the head injury?

Mandira Banerjee: Stoddard is a Research Assistant Professor in the University of Michigan School of Public Health in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education. Her research interest includes adolescent health and resiliency and how individual and social environmental risk and preventive factors account for youth violence.

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