Dyspraxia or Developmental Coordination Disorder

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[PeterPan]

It could be he's dealing with both. Now our OT seemed to think that proprioception problems came from the low tone. Whether she was implying the dyspraxia did too, I don't know. That Gut Psychology book I glanced through at the SLP's seemed to indicate dyspraxia is caused by the gut. I really don't know. I know dd had the problem with milk it describes, and she never seems to really clean out her gut thoroughly despite years of eating relatively well. I think it's that the low tone affects not only the OUTER body but the inner. In other words, people with low tone are going to be prone to problems that cause other problems. So *if* dyspraxia is caused by gut and inner chemical imbalances (which I have no substantiation for and didn't even have time to flesh out properly by reading that book), then it would make sense why they occur together.

 

Enough theorizing to get you anywhere? Beyond that, I really don't know. It seems strange to me that I have a child labeled as having dyspraxia issues, another with apraxia issues, but one dyslexic (clear bilaterality issues) and the other having no evidence of bilaterality problems. The bilaterality problems probably confound the dyspraxia and make it worse but don't cause it. Maybe?

 

I guess I assumed all this time your OT had labeled you as dealing with both. Is there something more you're wanting her to do? What do you think would change with the additional label? Did you ask her about it? Ours used both terms and yet still was doing things similar to yours. I'm not sure what changes. Whatever it is, surely you have to improve the sensory side first to have a foundation to work with. Besides, you said he was running better. Seems to me like his motor control issues have improved, haven't they? What specific symptoms are you finding that aren't resolving?

[Laura Corin]

Calvin has coordination difficulties (with various diagnoses, dependent on what country we were living in). From ages 4 to 7 he saw the OT once or (latterly) twice a week. We then moved to China and we made sure that he kept moving (hours of Taekwondo each week, plus scouts and home-based exercise), doing some kind of exercise for an hour every day. We used HWT for handwriting and, over time, his writing improved to more-or-less-legible. I also made sure that he learned to touch type, so that's what he does now for longer pieces of work with special dispensation to use a keyboard for exams.

 

So, now that he is fourteen, the situation is this: he participates in sport at school - he's not great but he's not obviously disabled; he can write, but it's barely legible and is still slow, so he mostly types; he's happy taking long hikes and deals pretty well with situations where he has to rely on his body to keep him out of danger (difficult walking/climbing). It's been a long haul, but we've reached a stage where his body doesn't get in his way.

 

Best wishes

 

Laura

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[Dobela]

Interesting. I've been familiar with the GAPS diet for a long time. We tend to have a traditional foods diet, ever since ds had his first (and only) food allergy reaction when he was two. I may take a closer look at the Gut and Psychology Syndrome. Not really because I believe that it alone will "cure" dyspraxia, but because I do think dysbiosis is at the bottom of a host of ills. If it's a contributing factor, doing the full GAPS diet won't be that hard for us to swing. The intro diet will be tough, but I think that we'd actually go through that fairly quickly, given the way we currently eat. Hmmm... You have me thinking again, Elizabeth. :D

 

As for our OT... The thing is that ds is at the point where he has a fair amount of tone and strength, but that isn't translating into motor planning. Ds was never really an "obvious" SPD kid. He was never sensory-seeking or sensory-avoiding. He was just generally low-register, mellow, co-operative and eager to please. Neither OT, the Wilbarger protocol, nor Therapeutic Listening seemed to do a thing for demeanor (which was already very sweet), but what was frustrating was that they didn't do anything for his coordination either. So here is a kid who really, really tries to do whatever is asked of him, but is constantly colliding with his inability. Lots of things are getting better. I credit vision therapy with a lot of the improvements, but I'm sure OT laid a great foundation too.

 

But as you've said to me before, I'm getting spoiled by our other therapies. ;) I want a "fix."

 

Every time I read about cerebellar deficits (I'm not talking about the major cerebellar disorders, but rather the descriptions of the sub-clinical issues that are probably related to cerebellum function), I think to myself, That's my kid. And it explains just about all of his issues -- vision, language processing, co-ordination, tone. So that's where I'm looking now.

 

I'm wondering if any of the moms (or dads) here have been dealing with dyspraxia/DCD and what they are doing for it. Ds has done a year of OT. Ds just started horse riding lessons, and I'm thinking about gymnastics. I'm looking into Balametrics and DORE. I'll check out GAPS. What else?[/QUOTE]

 

Have you looked into a physical therapy eval? At his age PT and OT do many of the same things but focus on different body muscle groups. I have found with my dd that her PT complements and supports the toning, coordination activities, and strength building that her OT was doing. A lot of the PT movements that we are also doing at home remind me lots of those old aerobics tapes I used to use in the 90s so maybe incorporating an exercise tape designed for core or strength building would be helpful. I will say thought that when dd3 does them the focus is on slow and steady movements rather than fast and lots of repetitions. I now wonder if some of my son's lack of improvement thru OT is because we didn't work enough on whole body strength building.

[PeterPan]

Ok, to be clear, I'm NOT endorsing the GAPS diet and DON'T follow it in my house. However I do think that there is a connection between the low tone and my body's own propensity to have sluggish bowels, despite eating very, very well. The bowels are, after all, muscles and movers. So the sluggish bowels create the digestion and dysbiosis problems or a propensity to them, and the messy gut and poor digestion create the other problems. It's the only way I can explain rationally that my dh eats things and still has consistent bowel movements (sorry to be gross), but my whole system will slow down or stop simply with negative emotions or a little something bad. I think this sluggishness and propensity to get logged up for me and dd is connected to the tone.

 

Next thing, are you being realistic? How do you expect the motor control problems to go away? Of course he has problems in parts of his brain. You did or did not get the neuropsych eval? Our OT said a neuropsych eval would actually tell her which specific parts were underfunctioning, and then she could work on them via IM. So there are ways to work on it, but that's what you have to do. And I don't think you do IM till you make tracks on the sensory stuff. Does your current OT do IM? Did she have an opinion on when you would start?

 

I think improved proprioception can offset some of the dyspraxia symptoms. In our case, I would be shocked if it just goes away, utterly shocked. I don't see how it can frankly. It's not like you can do therapy for every bit of motor planning. There's too much associated. For instance our OT was showing us how her idea generation (writing, ability to spit out things) is connected to the dyspraxia. Crazy. Too many labels for lots of interconnected things. I think some can improve and some can't. You've talked about that listening therapy a lot and that it bothered you that it made no seeming effect. I guess that wouldn't rattle me, because that's pretty fringe. It seems like he made SO much progress in the last year, I'm not sure why you're discontent. I mean by all means move forward, but you've had a year of really solid OT and VT and have made progress in both. Nobody talks about OT in terms of a single year. It's always YEARS, plural. To me the question I would ask is how does she think the dyspraxia portion of it relates to the SPD and when will it improve? I think you're looking at something farther up the neurological tree, something that develops later. They have all these pyramid diagrams. Probably there's one in the pile of books you and I have been reading, lol.

 

Callirobics in motor planning. It uses the music to organize the brain and retrains them on the movements for writing, one at a time. That's for the dyspraxia side of it. You couldn't do that till you had the eyes corrected, finger strength, neurological weightshifting so they could sit correctly without pounding into their wrist, core and shoulder strength, etc. These things have to go in an order. Did you ask the OT about dyspraxia?

 

BTW, ours is pretty hair-brained. She spent half the evaluation sessions telling me how this and that were symptoms of dyspraxia, and then she didn't put it into the written evaluation at all. Go figure. I wondered if maybe there are degrees (which she seemed to indicate) and that you can be seeing it but that it's not so much that they're professionally ok to put it on the paper, kwim?

[PeterPan]

BTW, I think you're also missing that you're already working on it. When your speech therapist connects vision and expressive language to movement, that's working on the dyspraxia. The expressive language problem definitely connects the motor difficulties (hand and mouth) with the bilaterality issues and the working memory. Motor skills don't occur in isolation. They're using the eyes or the mouth and the two sides of the brain. You had to fix a lot before you could go back and gently improve the motor output part. You had to have a foundation.

 

Take for instance the ability to replicate a hand motion. Dd can't do it. But can she not do it because she CAN'T, or because for 11 years she had extremely poor vision and no depth perception, poor visual processing skills. Is that something that may improve with time and use, now that she actually can see and process, in order to have correct inputs to give to the brain? I don't know. Frankly, I doubt it, lol. Let's just say her sign language is a little off, lol. But we'll see. But if the motor control was a part of the brain that could be nurtured and developed, it didn't even have a chance before.

Edited February 7, 2011 by OhElizabeth

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[PeterPan]

Our OT said (and this sort of jives with what I've read online) that if you don't do the vestibular with the tone stuff, the muscle work won't stick as well. I took her to mean you could actually lose all your tone work over time. :(

 

GAPS isn't the only way to work on the gut.

Edited February 7, 2011 by OhElizabeth

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[Tiramisu]

I have a friend with a dc who may have dyspraxia and SPD, including eating problems. She met with a ped. gastroenterologist at a prominent chidlren's hospital who believes that kids with SPD have motility issues.

 

I am relieved that SPD finally seems to be taken seriously by medical specialists, at least some of them.

[PeterPan]

Have you looked at IM? It improves the executive function which then helps the motor control and motor planning. Isn't that right?

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[Tiramisu]

NJKelli - You know, it really makes sense to me that someone with hypotonia would also have accompanying issues with motility, but I've also read other articles that while peristalsis is one factor in making things move along, our gut biota plays an equal, if not more important, role. And then here's this wacky idea that one of the reasons why SPD or dyspraxic kids might have digestion and food pickiness issue is because they have unbalanced gut flora, which are also releasing by-products that cause their SPD, dyspraxia, attention issues, mood disorders, etc. Or, at least the by-products are aggravating their symptoms to the point that other treatments are not as effective.

 

 

What you're saying here makes sense to me. I started taking probiotics about two years ago after the monster stomach virus that took months to recover from, and the biggest change I recognized, even more than the digestive improvement, was that I felt much more clear headed. Did balancing my gut flora do this? It also may have been helped by finally weaning my three year old who.would.never.stop.

 

I never thought of myself as having SPD but, as I learn more about it and observe my own children, I'm starting to see where they may get it from. I guess this means I have to shell out more money to get the whole gang on probiotics.:glare:

[PeterPan]

You do realize gut clearing and flora are interconnected... You improve the gut clearance so stop the putrification that allows the bad bugs to flourish. You put in the good bugs. You use fruit and veges (the very thing some people tell you not to take for candida, ironically) to clean out the layer of shale and junk that builds up in the gut. You take good bugs (we use Primadophilus) to put the good bugs back in. It's a total picture, not just one thing.

 

For us another component has been going off red meat (hard to digest), white flour (except on rare occasions) and cheese.

 

Oh, and you do nightly gut massage, which for me is actually more instrumental than anything. My blessed pre-teen resists it. A little child might not. It's easy enough to learn. Look up ileocecal valve and learn how to open it. As long as you take your time and press firmly and slowly you're not going to mess it up. The whole area below the ribcage is pretty much intestines. Anything that hurts is crud locked up. Have fun.