The Neuropsychological Profile of Infantile Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy

6533b7cffe1ef96bd1258404

RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Neuropsychological Profile of Infantile Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy

Giovanni Mento Vincenza Tarantino Patrizia Bisiacchi

subject

Male Developmental Disabilities Duchenne muscular dystrophy Intelligence Neuropsychological Tests Praxi Juvenile rheumatoid arthriti Developmental psychology Settore M-PSI/04 - Psicologia Dello Sviluppo E Psicologia Dell'Educazione Executive Function Discrimination Psychological Developmental and Educational Psychology Neuropsychological assessment Muscular dystrophy Child media_common medicine.diagnostic_test Medicine (all)Neuropsychology Phonological analysi Cognition Verbal Learning Psychiatry and Mental health Clinical Psychology Memory Short-Term Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Child Preschool Neuropsychological Test Female Psychology Human Clinical psychology Duchenne muscular dystrophy musculoskeletal diseases Developmental Disabilitie media_common.quotation_subject Verbal learning Neuropsychological assessment Statistics Nonparametric Cognition Disorder Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)Perception medicine Humans Discrimination (Psychology)Settore M-PSI/02 - Psicobiologia E Psicologia Fisiologica medicine.disease Arthritis Juvenile Muscular Dystrophy Duchenne Perception Cognition Disorders Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis

description

It has been shown that children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) exhibit specific cognitive deficits. However, the neuropsychological profile has not yet been fully characterized. In order to control for the contribution of motor impairments as a confounding variable that is usually present when assessing children with muscular pathologies, we compared children with DMD to a group of children with an autoimmune pathology that does not entail either brain or cognitive dysfunction but does imply motor impairment: juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA). An extensive neuropsychological evaluation was administered, including intelligence, perception, language, memory and learning, attention, executive function, praxis and reasoning. As the main result, in children with DMD we found significantly lower performances in verbal IQ, verbal short-term memory and phonological abilities, as well as in praxis and executive functioning domains. A wide range of cognitive domains, including verbal abilities, executive functioning, and praxis, must be taken into account when assessing neuropsychological functioning in children with DMD. In particular, subtle executive function impairment could be considered as a subclinical marker of cognitive impairment in developmental disorders. © 2011 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

year	journal	country	edition	language
2011-01-01

http://hdl.handle.net/11577/139675