Understanding the mechanisms of cognitive impairments in developmental coordination disorder

Abstract

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD), a neurodevelopmental disability in which a child's motor coordination difficulties significantly interfere with activities of daily life or academic achievement, together with additional symptoms of diseases with childhood sensorimotor impairments, increases the risk of many cognitive problems. This exhibits the dynamic interplay between sensorimotor and cognition systems. However, the brain structures and pathways involved have remained unknown over the past decades. Here, we review developments in recent years that elucidate the neural mechanisms involved in the sensorimotor-cognitive difficulties. First, we briefly address the clinical and epidemiological discoveries in DCD as well as its comorbidities. Subsequently, we group the growing evidence including our findings that support the notion that sensorimotor manipulation indeed affects the cognition development at systematic, circuitry, cellular, and molecular levels. This corresponds to changes in diverse brain regions, synaptic plasticity, and neurotransmitter and receptor activity during development under these effects. Finally, we address the treatment potentials of task-oriented sensorimotor enhancement, as a new therapeutic strategy for cognitive rehabilitation, based on our current understanding of the neurobiology of cognitive-sensorimotor interaction.

Infant Motor Skills After a Cardiac Operation: The Need for Developmental Monitoring and Care

“…The risk of severe motor impairment was 11-times greater than for control children [20]. Our finding of declines during hospitalization are important, because delays in gross motor functioning may have implications for learning and psychosocial development through adulthood [21,22] and many infants do not have subsequent formal neurodevelopmental evaluations [23].…”

Early Motor Skills in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders Are Marked by Less Frequent Hand and Knees Crawling

“…Indeed, this link between motor and cognitive abilities is not ASD specific, as it is well known in typical development (Iverson, 2010) and in other developmental disorders as well. For example, children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (World Health Organization, 1994) have encountered motor deficits often followed by other cognitive problems, such as disorders of attention or speech/language (Deng et al., 2014). These various hypothetical explanations for a reduced frequency of H&K crawling among children with ASD relative to children with typical development may not be mutually exclusive, as they may be combined in some or all children with ASD.…”

Revealing hot executive function in children with motor coordination problems: What’s the go?

“…More precisely, hypoactivity of the attentional network in DCD including the DL-PFC (Querne et al, 2008) would compromise the initial stages of motor learning and action planning (Brown-Lum & Zwicker, 2015). Further, reduced prefrontal involvement in action planning may contribute to the high comorbidity of attentional problems with DCD (Deng et al, 2014), with consequences for both motor learning and selective inhibition of responses. Our current findings suggest that a reduced ability to inhibit responses to emotional cues may bias the child's attention in ways that do not facilitate skill learning.…”

“…Moreover, given the extensive connections between VM-PFC and the emotion circuitry of the brain, disruption of prefrontal regulation could underlie reduced emotional regulation that has been observed in DCD (Deng et al, 2014). Although cognitive inhibition -integral to interference control and selective attention -has been tested extensively in DCD, there is a dire need to investigate behavioral inhibition (i.e., self-control, resistance to temptation) (Diamond, 2013) in this cohort.…”