A neuropsychological profile of Down syndrome: Cognitive skills and brain morphology

Abstract

In children and young adults with Down syndrome, there exists a profile of neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses. Verbal short‐term memory skills are diminished relative to subjects with mental retardation resulting from other etiologies. On the other hand, visual‐motor skills are comparatively well preserved. This profile distinguishes the population having Down syndrome from other impaired populations, although it may be confounded by dementia in later adult years. Down syndrome also results in a characteristic profile of brain morphology. In vivo magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown that the frontal and temporal regions of the brain are proportionally diminished in Down syndrome, but that the volumes of the subcortical nuclei are similar to those in control subjects. This profile of brain morphology appears to correspond to both the neuropathologic data on Down syndrome and to the profile of cognitive skills in individuals who have this syndrome. Impairment of fundamental cognitive processes such as phonologic short‐term memory is likely to have implications with regard to higher‐order psychological and academic processes. Effective educational intervention must take such impairments into account during the development of individualized educational plans. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

Fine motor skills in children with Down syndrome

“…Statistically significant differences were observed between children with unknown etiology and children with organic/other genetic cause of intellectual disability, where children with unknown etiology achieved better results. Many studies have shown that children with Down syndrome have a heterogeneous cognitive profile (Wang, 1996). The results of this study indicate that having a Down syndrome is not by itself a risk factor for having a fine motor deficit, as compared to the intellectual disability caused by other factors.…”

Auditory and visual sustained attention in Down syndrome

“…Modern medicine has alleviated some of the physical abnormalities often attributed to DS, including congenital heart defects (Stos et al, 2004). However, cognitive abnormalities remain pervasive in DS (Wang, 1996;Silverman, 2007).…”

“…The Score task could be considered a measure of auditory working memory, as participants must both remember the number of target tones presented and use this information to continue counting tones over time. Auditory working memory is considered a specific deficit in DS, which could explain Costanzo et al's finding using this task (e.g., Jarrold et al, 2000;Silverman, 2007;Wang, 1996). On the other hand, perhaps contrasting results can be explained by differences in groups' chronological ages between studies.…”

Brain-predicted age in Down syndrome is associated with beta amyloid deposition and cognitive decline

“…Brain atrophy in DS is likely to be gradual and cumulative, caused by factors such as increased amyloid deposition or secondary effects of exposure to abnormal neurodevelopment, rather than resulting from a one-off insult. While DS brains have been shown to be abnormal in size and morphology ( Annus et al., 2017 , Wang, 1996 ), brain-PAD scores did not correlate with ICV, nor does ICV correlate with brain-PAD in healthy individuals, so global size differences do not appear to be driving the results. Distinctive brain morphology in DS also did not seem to influence our findings as we observed no differences in the MAE of age prediction in the DS and control groups; age prediction accuracy was not hindered by any morphologic features of DS.…”