Intellectual Disability Flashcards
What are the skills we develop as newborns, children and adults as we get older?
- newborns: develop response to their environment to communicate their needs
- children: learn to solve problems related to daily living and more abstract problems
- adults: learn to solve abstract problems
Which 3 normal cognitive skills are lacking in a child with intellectual disability?
- language
- activity of daily living (like taking care of yourself)
- Learning and memory
What are some potential broad causes of ID ?
genetic, environment, drugs, brain malformation
they can be inherited or sporadic (de novo) where parents dont have it but it was somewhere down the line
How many % of the population does ID effect?
3%
What are the age ranges that ID is diagnosed in typically?
diagnosed between 3 and 9 years old typically (the earlier the better) and is a lifetime disorder
What are some indirect (treatable) comorbidities associated with ID? (6)
- OCD
- Sleep defecits
- anxiety
- sensory processing defects
- epilepsy
- autism
What are some direct (non treatable) comorbidities present in all people with ID? (3)
- general mental ability
- defects in adaptive function
- onset in developmental period
What is used to assess the developmental milestones?
- scales are used and have been developed to monitor the development of children and acquisition of new skills (all doctors need to have this) it shows what time the child should be able to do certain activities
What is the psychometric testing approach to study intellectual development?
includes testing intelligence
what are the two types of intelligence?
theoretical (i.e. general mental capability, ability to reason, solve problems, think abstractly and plan)
and
objective (IQ)
Who was the first person to administer the IQ exam and why?
Alfred Binet was a psychologist that developed the IQ exams to test various mental functions to help identify the children who are struggling in school
- his test yielded a mental age of the child (age at which their mental capacity is at) and apply necessary schooling to keep child at appropriate mental age
What are 2 components of the IQ?
- verbal
2. non verbal (aka visuospatial) [usually for kids who cant speak or understand yet]
what is the properties of the IQ results?
- mean is 100
- IQ is normally distributed
- IQ is relative to the children of the same age
How is intellectual disability classified based on IQ level?
ID is an IQ of 2SD below the mean so below 70
What is the IQ of mild ID?
50 - 70
what is the IQ of moderate ID?
less than 36-50
What is the IQ of severe ID?
less than 20-35
What is the IQ of profound ID?
less than 20
What are some abnormalities that are common in ID and shown in CT scans and MRI’s
cerebellar hypolasia (small cerebellum/ataxia) [most commonly seen in imaging]
- schizencephaly (split or cut in brain)
- hemimegalencephaly (when one side of the brain is larger than the other
- dysmorphic brain
- cerebral atrophy (loss of neurons and connections between them)
How can genome sequencing tell us more about the genetics behind ID?
- it has a single base pair resolution
- allows us to identify single base pair changes in the DNA sequence of the exons or can be applied to entire genome (only looks at exons because introns are way too complicated to look at even tho introns contain most of our unique DNA)