Developmental Coordination Disorder and ADHD

Abstract

Purpose: Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a preva-lent childhood disorder with prevalence estimates commonly set at 5%. DCD is characterized by a significant impairment in the ability to produce coordinated movements, an impairment which leads to difficulties in scholastic achievement, activities of daily living, and physically active play and recreation. DCD is highly associated with depressed levels of physical activity and this activity deficit places children at high risk of obesity. DCD persists through adoles-cence where the concern with obesity is heightened as a very large proportion of adolescents who are overweight/obese remain over-weight as adults. The immediate health sequelae of overweight during adolescence coupled with the well-established risks of over-weight in adulthood make DCD of particular interest in this stage of development. At this juncture most work examining overweight among those with DCD has depended on field measures such as BMI or waist girth (WG) to establish overweight and a true measure of adiposity has not been reported. Further most research has re-ported children rather than adolescents. In this investigation we at-tempted to discern the true degree of adiposity of adolescents with DCD relative to their non-impaired peers. Methods: The study involved 126 subjects (63DCD; 37 M/26F and 63 non-DCD: 37 M/26F) matched for age, gender and school. The age of subjects ranged from 12-14 with a mean age of 12.6. Subjects were initially identified from school- testing using the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Performance 9short form) from over 2000 children in 75 schools in the Physical Activity Study Team in the Niagara Ontario. All subsequent measurements were taken in the anthropometry laboratory of Brock University. A probable diagnosis of DCD was established using the Movement Assess-ment Battery for Children administered by an experienced pedi-atric occupational therapist. Subjects scoring at or below the 15thpercentile were considered DCD cases. We determined the body fat of adolescents in the laboratory using air displacement (BOD-POD), a highly accurate estimation of both fat mass (FM) and free fatty mass (FFM) along with WG and BMI. Results: T-scores (adjusted for unequal variances) found highly significant differences (p