Clinical and Sociodemographic Features of Children and Adolescents with Specific Learning Disorder (SLD)

Abstract

Background: To evaluate of child or adolescent with specific learning disorder (SLD) was aimed and if there are any distinctive patterns of Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) performance, accepted as a determiner of cognitive functioning, was explored. Method: Over a-year period of data related to SLD diagnosed with DSM-IV-TR criteria was reviewed. Socio-demographic and clinical features were analyzed by using SPSS 17.0 program. Results: In a year of period, 716/25,013 had any type of SLD (2.9%). Mean age was 8.9±1.7 years with 65.4% of boys and 87.2% of under 12-year-old group. The majority of SLD subtype was "reading disorder (71.6%)". There was no difference of SLD subtypes either distribution between sexes or age groups. Neither verbal IQ nor performance IQ was significantly different amongst four subtypes of SLD as well as total IQ scores. Also any relation was not found between subtypes of SLD and sexes or age groups in the distribution of WISC-R scores terms. Also there were not any consistent discrepancy patterns (VIQ>PIQ or PIQ>VIQ) in SLD subtypes. The presence of "reading disorder" was found significantly related with attention deficit-hyperactivity (ADHD) comorbidity (X 2 =7.006, p=0.008). Conclusions and Recommendations: ADHD is one of neurodevelopmental disorders and its presence could very well affect the SLD or vice versa. Further research would make clear both the relation between ADHD and SLD. Alongside cognitive measurements by using a number of intelligence scales would be enlightening in SLD field.

The structure of intelligence in children with specific learning disabilities is different as compared to typically development children

“…For a start, we only had data on the 10 core subtests of the WISC-IV; other subtests could be used too. Second, we only had data on the WISC-IV; other, recently-released tests could be used instead, such as the WISC-V (Wechsler, 2014), or the Leiter-3 (Roid, Miller, Pomplun, & Koch, 2013) Future research is also needed to examine the intellectual patterns of other atypical groups, and especially children with ADHD, who seem to be similar in some ways to cases of SLD (Goker, Uneri, Guney, Dinc, & Hekim-bozkurt, 2014). …”

Clinical profile of children with specific learning disability presenting to a psychiatric clinic

“…In our study, we found that the majority of the children with SLD (56.2%) came in the category of 10-15 years, which corroborates with both Indian and western studies. [5] We observed that 40% of the study sample was in the age 77 group of 5-9 years. This indicates the growing level of awareness among parents and teachers regarding SLD as a disorder which needs evaluation.…”