3 research outputs found
Intellectual disability in patients with epilepsy with eyelid myoclonias
Get PDFWe describe here the clinical outcome of four women with epilepsy with eyelid myoclonia (aged 21–53 years). All patients had an uneventful early history, normal physical growth and appearance and no comorbid sensory or motor disability and normal brain magnetic resonance imaging finding. Two women were moderately and one mildly intellectually disabled and one showed a low-average intelligence. The overall well-being of the patients was hampered by psychiatric or various somatic comorbidities and related psychosocial problems. The three women with an intellectual disability had been treated with narrow-spectrum antiepileptic drugs and one also with vigabatrin during childhood and adolescence. The patient with a low-average intelligence had been on broad-spectrum antiepileptic medication (i.e. valproate and ethosuximide) since the epilepsy diagnosis but she has had compliance problems. Based on these cases, the cognitive deficits in patients with epilepsy with eyelid myoclonia may occur more commonly than what has been thought hitherto. We discuss the role of narrow-spectrum antiepileptic drugs as a contributing factor to poor seizure control and an impaired intelligence
Continuous Spike-Wave in Slow Wave Sleep (CSWS) Mimicking Dementia in a 55-Year-Old Man with Intellectual Disability
No full textAuditory and speech processing in specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia
No full textThis thesis investigates auditory and speech processing in Specific Language
Impairment (SLI) and dyslexia. One influential theory of SLI and dyslexia postulates
that both SLI and dyslexia stem from similar underlying sensory deficit that impacts
speech perception and phonological development leading to oral language and literacy
deficits. Previous studies, however, have shown that these underlying sensory deficits
exist in only a subgroup of language impaired individuals, and the exact nature of these
deficits is still largely unknown.
The present thesis investigates three aspects of auditory-phonetic interface: 1) The
weighting of acoustic cues to phonetic voicing contrast 2) the preattentive and attentive
discrimination of speech and non-linguistic stimuli and 3) the formation of auditory
memory traces for speech and non-linguistic stimuli in young adults with SLI and
dyslexia. This thesis focuses on looking at both individial and group-level data of
auditory and speech processing and their relationship with higher-level language
measures. The groups of people with SLI and dyslexia who participated were aged
between 14 and 25 and their performance was compared to a group of controls matched
on chronological age, IQ, gender and handedness.
Investigations revealed a complex pattern of behaviour. The results showed that
individuals with SLI or dyslexia are not poor at discriminating sounds (whether speech
or non-speech). However, in all experiments, there was more variation and more outliers
in the SLI group indicating that auditory deficits may occur in a small subgroup of the
SLI population. Moreover, investigations of the exact nature of the input-processing
deficit revealed that some individuals with SLI have less categorical representations for
speech sounds and that they weight the acoustic cues to phonemic identity differently
from controls and dyslexics
