Children With Epilepsy: Specific Learning Difficulties

Abstract

SUMMARYThe problems of children and adolescents with epilepsy pose an important challenge for educational systems around the world. Epilepsy is the most common chronic neurological disease, which occurs in up to 1% of children and adolescents. The largest incidence of onset is from early childhood to adolescence, therefore, mostly the emotional, cognitive and social problems experienced by patients coincide with the school period. It is commonly believed, as indicated by research, that some of the children and adolescents with epilepsy experience learning difficulties and school problems. This article presents the educational problems of a group of patients in Poland with epilepsy and the co-occurring specific difficulties in the acquisition of scholastic skills like dyslexia, spelling disorder or dyscalculia. The work is a review with an analysis of a case study.

The association between disability, school achievement expectations, self‐efficacy and psychosomatic problems among Swedish adolescents attending compulsory regular school

“…In this study, a broad definition of disability including different types of disabilities and chronic conditions was used, thus constituting a relatively heterogeneous group of adolescents with disabilities. However, one argument for having this broad definition is that it seems to exist comorbidity between different disabilities and chronic conditions, and in turn with having different forms of learning disabilities (Blood et al, 2003; Kaczmarek et al, 2016; Pavlou & Gkampeta, 2011; Wassenberg et al, 2010). Nevertheless, some of the research presented in the introduction have been conducted with specific types of conditions (e.g., ADHD or diabetes), which may affect the comparability between our results and this type of research.…”

“…Compared to adolescents without ADHD, research showed that adolescents with ADHD had lower academic achievements (Kandemir et al, 2014; Owens & Jackson, 2017; Voltas et al, 2014). Research also provides evidence for poor academic achievements among adolescents with epilepsy (Kaczmarek et al, 2016), asthma (Kohen, 2010), and adolescents with diabetes (Persson et al, 2013). Nevertheless, research showed that adolescents with a chronic medical condition did not report lower academic aspirations than their healthy peers (Wisk & Weitzman, 2017).…”