Brain Imaging Increases Our Understanding of Developmental Coordination Disorder: a Review of Literature and Future Directions

Abstract

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a neuromotor disorder of unknown etiology characterized by poor motor skills that significantly interferes with a child's ability to perform everyday activities and affects their psychosocial well-being. Little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying motor impairment, making it difficult to understand why children with DCD struggle to learn motor skills and what the best intervention would be to optimize function. With the advent of advanced neuroimaging techniques, several MRI studies have been conducted to tackle this important issue. Findings from these studies suggest that children with DCD activate different regions of the brain during functional tasks and show differences in white matter microstructure compared to typically developing children. The emerging neuroimaging data will help clarify the possible underlying mechanisms in relation to impaired motor function at the behavioral level in children with DCD.

What can autism teach us about the role of sensorimotor systems in higher cognition? New clues from studies on language, action semantics, and abstract emotional concept processing

“…It is highly likely that the motor deficits seen in the different developmental conditions, which may not always be distinguishable behaviourally, have differing neural origins, hence the different symptom complexes in these conditions. The neural substrates of motor dysfunction in DCD, ADHD and SLI have not received quite as much attention: there are many hypotheses regarding DCD but few with neurobiological support from brain imaging (see reviews by Brown-Lum &Zwicker, 2015, andGomez &Sirigu, 2015: of these, the corpus callosum, cerebellum, parietal lobe and basal ganglia are highlighted, but studies contain extremely small samples); studies of SLI have mainly focused on perisylvian language cortices (see Mayes, Reilly, & Morgan, 2015 for review, but note that these authors admit the confusion regarding classification of this condition across studies). ADHD and autism are commonly comorbid, both more commonly diagnosed in males 10 and seem to both be characterized by abnormal connectivity (Kern et al, 2015;Konrad & Eickhoff, 2010); they may be set apart by the concentration of dysconnectivity in particular regions.…”

Neural Signature of DCD: A Critical Review of MRI Neuroimaging Studies

“…The available data were therefore extremely heterogeneous and suggested that multiple brain areas are involved in the neuropathophysiology of DCD. Two years later, Brown-Lum and Zwicker (64) listed seven MRI studies and two diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), but were unable to reach any firmer formal conclusions. Our own review, conducted 1 year later, brought five more neuroimaging studies to light.…”

Revealing hot executive function in children with motor coordination problems: What’s the go?

“…More precisely, hypoactivity of the attentional network in DCD including the DL-PFC (Querne et al, 2008) would compromise the initial stages of motor learning and action planning (Brown-Lum & Zwicker, 2015). Further, reduced prefrontal involvement in action planning may contribute to the high comorbidity of attentional problems with DCD (Deng et al, 2014), with consequences for both motor learning and selective inhibition of responses.…”