I'm an expert in pediatrics, so I'll focus my comments on pediatrics, because I'm not as familiar with the adult literature.
We recently published a study in JAMA Pediatrics which looked at the natural progression of recovery from concussion. Again, we're using our cohort of children who had their injury within a few hours. The good news is that most kids, depending on their ages—there are two factors: their age and their sex—recover in the first week or two following their concussions with the exception of teenage girls. Teenage girls take about four weeks. Most of the recovery that is going to happen for them is going to happen in four weeks. Beyond that, unfortunately, it seems as though the recovery fairly plateaus. We know that one-third, or 30%, of children are still symptomatic at one month. About 20% or so of people are still symptomatic at three months.
The recovery curve, although it went very quickly down in that first week or two weeks depending on your age and so on, does flatten out over time. That's when we need to come up with these better ways to figure out how best to treat them. Is it, again, through interdisciplinary manners, or is it focused on their symptoms, or are there ways for us to better detect what we are treating?