This 17-year-old girl wowed coaches on Saturday night with her original cover of Lady Gaga’s song Poker Face. After a lot of work. And for good reason: Isilde suffers from dyspraxia, a handicap which prevents her from performing many daily actions. “I’m very, very clumsy, I have trouble doing silly things like my shoelaces, dissociating the right from the left, having benchmarks in time … I have a very approximate notion of time. These are silly things, but which, in everyday life, take up a fairly important place ”, she told the site Purepeolple.com
What is dyspraxia?
Dyspraxia, like all so-called “Dys” disorders, is a specific developmental cognitive disorder. Dyspraxia manifests itself in motor development disorders with, in particular, the learning of gestures, the acquisition of sensorimotor coordination (when we want to reach an object that we have located) as well as visio-spatial functions (which allow us to orient ourselves in space, to perceive the objects of our environment and to mentally imagine an object physically absent). Children and adults can be affected by dyspraxia. It is estimated to affect between 1 and 6% of the school-age population. Boys are more affected than girls (from 3 to 5 boys for 1 girl).
Symptoms of dyspraxia
Symptoms of dyspraxia are present from the early stages of development and manifest as pronounced psychomotor delays, severe clumsiness as well as dysgraphia (specific handwriting disorder). We thus find a difficulty:
– in learning gestures such as learning to dress, use cutlery, help yourself to drink, tie your shoes, do your hair …
– in fine motor activities such as writing, drawing, coloring, cutting … as well as in the use and production of visual documents, especially those containing spatial information (tables, curves, graphs, etc. ..)
– in games (construction games, dolls, marbles, handling a joystick …) and leisure: practice of a sport, a musical instrument, manual work …
– in space: difficulties in locating oneself in space, in particular to move in unfamiliar places, to find one’s way on a map …
– in L’inability to take a readable note and fast: the written documents produced are then unusable for revising, learning or restoring knowledge during checks.
In this context, the motor activities of daily life easily defeat (especially at school) and limit participation in playful activities. Clumsiness can then contribute to isolation. Visio-spatial difficulties can also lead to an inability to move to unfamiliar places, without being accompanied, to find one’s way on a neighborhood or public transport map, thus limiting the possibilities of autonomous movement.
The functional consequences may lie in slowness, great fatigue and a situation ofschool failure. In addition, these people may encounter organizational disorders that affect all sectors of life (organization of the satchel, pencil case, filing cabinets, office, etc.) which aggravate their slowness and ineffectiveness on a daily basis.
The whole thing contributes to a bad self-esteem often reinforced by a incomprehension of the adults. This can sometimes generate serious depression or inappropriate reactions (presence, withdrawal, opposition) which can be mistaken for behavioral disorders. It is therefore important to be vigilant.
Dyspraxia: which examinations should be performed?
To diagnose dyspraxia, different tests must be done. A neuropsychological assessment to rule out mental retardation is particularly necessary. A psychomotricity assessment (which raises gross motor skills) and occupational therapy (which raises fine motor skills) also, in order to assess and target the patient’s difficulties and know the scale of the disorders. An orthoptic check-up will help identify visual scanning difficulties. Finally, a consultation with a pediatric neurologist is necessary in order to make the diagnosis, in view of the four assessments carried out and to provide additional genetic, neurological and pediatric analysis.
Dyspraxia: what treatments?
Dyspraxia cannot be cured. The patient learns to live with it, to overcome his difficulties by adopting compensatory strategies. The treatments that can be put in place following the diagnosis include specific and targeted rehabilitation with practitioners such as a psychomotor therapist, an occupational therapist and an orthoptist.
