It is essential to understand the development of the nervous system and its different stages to understand the deficits that may appear due to abnormal brain development or brain damage at an early age. Depending on when these abnormalities or damage occur (during pregnancy, in the perinatal period or during childhood), their repercussions will vary.
Some of the disorders included in this classification can be completely resolved with appropriate intervention. Others are chronic, but in this case appropriate intervention is also essential, since it is possible to mitigate to a greater or lesser degree and, in some cases, even eliminate the negative consequences or symptoms produced by the disorder.
* Intellectual disability meets all the criteria to belong to this category, but we have considered it justified to give it its own section.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
It is characterized by marked symptoms of inattention and/or impulsivity-hyperactivity. There are subtypes depending on whether the predominant symptom is attention deficit, hyperactivity-impulsivity or both equally.
The main manifestations in each area are:
Inattention:
- Failure to pay attention to details and careless mistakes,
- difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities,
- is easily distracted by irrelevant stimuli,
- does not seem to listen when spoken to directly,
- does not follow instructions or finish tasks,
- has difficulty organizing tasks and activities,
- avoids as far as possible tasks that require sustained mental effort,
- is forgetful in daily activities.
Hyperactivity:
- Fidgets in the seat or moves hands and feet excessively,
- gets up in situations where they should remain seated,
- excess energy,
- runs or jumps excessively in inappropriate situations (in adults, a feeling of restlessness),
- difficulty playing or engaging quietly in leisure activities,
- talks excessively.
Impulsivity:
- Blurts out answers before the question has been completed,
- has difficulty waiting their turn,
- interrupts or intrudes on others’ activities.
Specific Learning Disorders
Cognitive abilities are not homogeneous within the same person, but if, after appropriate development, one area is particularly deficient, we speak of a specific learning problem. It is characterized by academic performance substantially below what is expected given the person’s chronological age, measured intelligence and age-appropriate education. These disorders significantly interfere with school performance, hindering the child’s progress and the achievement of the goals set in educational plans.
Reading disorder (dyslexia)
It is characterized by impaired word recognition, slow and uncertain reading and poor comprehension.
Disorder of written expression (dysgraphia)
The problem may lie in writing specific words or in general writing and composition.
Mathematics disorder (dyscalculia)
It affects the learning of basic arithmetic knowledge (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) rather than more abstract mathematical knowledge (algebra or geometry).
Communication Disorders
They appear when language development does not follow the expected pattern or when there are significant deficits in some of its aspects. The linguistic characteristics of each disorder vary depending on its severity and the child’s age.
Expressive language disorder
The ability to express oneself orally is markedly below the level appropriate for the child’s mental age. Difficulties may appear in both verbal and gestural language.
Its main characteristics are: quantitatively limited speech, reduced vocabulary, difficulty acquiring new words, vocabulary or word-retrieval errors, excessively short sentences, simplified grammatical structures, limited variety of grammatical structures and sentence types, omission of critical parts of sentences, unusual word order and slowed language development.
Receptive language disorder
The ability to understand is markedly below the level appropriate for the child’s mental age. Expression is also notably affected (this disorder is often called “mixed receptive-expressive language disorder”), because the development of expressive language relies on the acquisition of receptive skills.
Apart from the characteristics of the expressive language disorder mentioned above, in this case there is difficulty understanding words, sentences or specific types of words. There may also be deficits in different areas of auditory processing: sound discrimination, association of sounds and symbols, storage, recall and sequencing.
Phonological disorder (dyslalia)
Its main characteristic is the inability to use the speech sounds that are developmentally appropriate for the child’s age and language.
It may involve errors in the production, use, representation or organization of sounds, such as substituting one sound for another or omitting sounds.
Stuttering (dysphemia)
A disorder of the normal fluency and timing of speech that is inappropriate for the person’s age.
It is characterized by frequent repetitions or prolongations of sounds or syllables. There may also be interjections, broken words, blocks (audible or silent), circumlocutions, words produced with excessive physical tension and repetitions of monosyllabic words.
It does not usually occur when reading aloud, singing or talking to inanimate objects or animals.
Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)
They are a group of developmental disabilities that can cause serious, and even chronic, problems with socialization, communication and behavior.
The way these alterations manifest varies greatly from one child to another, hence the term “spectrum” or “continuum of disorders”, which means that the symptoms of these disorders appear in different ways and that their severity varies from case to case. The clinical picture is neither uniform nor clearly defined; it ranges along a spectrum from greater to lesser impairment, changes over time and is influenced by factors such as the associated level of intellectual ability or access to specialized support.
People with ASD process information in their brain differently from others and develop at a different pace in each area. They are characterized by clinically significant and persistent difficulties in social communication (marked difficulty in the nonverbal and verbal communication used in interaction, lack of social reciprocity and difficulties developing and maintaining peer relationships appropriate to their developmental level), stereotyped motor or verbal behaviors, unusual sensory behaviors, excessive adherence to routines and ritualized patterns of behavior, and restricted interests.