We all fall victim to the normal aging process. The older we get we notice some decline, some slip-ups in our memory, our short term memory, our attention sometimes slips, and other times it's harder for us to accomplish the same tasks with the same energy that we used to. Our processing speed gets slower and some of the things that we do tend to get a little bit harder.
All of this is compounded when you have a head injury at an older age. With the normal aging process, when you have a concussion that is really a disruption in the electrical signals in the brain, it's harder for someone who is older to bounce back than if you were younger, 17 or 18 years old, with a head injury. The reason being is that the normal aging process has occurred and we're already at a deficit the older that we get.
Whereas a healthy 17- or 18-year-old may see a return to baseline in seven to 10 days, an older adult may expect something in one to three months. That's just a metric. It depends on the person, every person is different. I've seen patients who are 55 years old who had a head injury and they bounce right back within a week. This really is due to interpersonal differences, but in general, the older you are, the harder it is to regain that full functionality in that same time period. This is because of neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. While the brain can heal itself and the neural connections can continue to form and reconnect after an injury, it just goes a lot slower the older we are.
