Attentional and perceptual disturbances in children with Tourette's syndrome, attention deficit disorder, and epilepsy

Abstract

Perceptual, motor, and neuromaturational competence were assessed using a battery of tasks with three groups of children with diagnosed disorders of Tourette's syndrome (TS), attentional deficit with no known organic substrate (Constitutional AD), and attentional deficit disorder in children with epilepsy (E-ADD). The purpose was to determine how the three groups related to each other on these measures and to establish clinical validation of the test battery. As predicted, the control and the TS groups did much better than the ADD and seizure groups. The TS group differed from the controls on only a handful of measures, whereas the constitutional ADD and E-ADD children were far more deviant than the TS children. The E-ADD children as a group suffered difficulties in virtually every area.