Neurocognitive deficits in children with chronic health conditions.

Abstract

Over 4 million children in the United States suffer from chronic health conditions, including cancer, sickle cell disease, and diabetes. Because of major advances in the early identification and treatment of these conditions, survival rates for these children continue to rise, and the majority now lives into adulthood. However, increases in survival have come with costs related to long-term effects of disease processes and treatments. Foremost among these consequences is impairment in brain development and neurocognitive function that may affect a substantial portion of children with chronic health conditions and follow many into adulthood. Impaired cognitive function may contribute to impairment in educational and occupational attainment, mental health, and quality of life for children with chronic conditions. Despite the significance and scope of this problem, advances in the identification and understanding of neurocognitive problems and the delivery of effective clinical care have been hindered in part because research has been "siloed"-conducted on each chronic condition in isolation. This review examines, for the first time, neurocognitive problems in a selected set of 6 chronic pediatric health conditions-leukemia, brain tumors, sickle cell disease, congenital heart disease, Type 1 diabetes, and traumatic brain injury-to define the magnitude of the problem and identify directions for future research and clinical care. Psychologists from many areas of specialization, including pediatric psychology, educational and school psychology, neuropsychology, behavioral medicine, and adult primary care, are uniquely positioned to contribute to every phase of this work, including research, identification, and intervention. (PsycINFO Database Record

Associations between stuttering, comorbid conditions and executive function in children: a population-based study

“…It is noteworthy that chronic health conditions are also associated with impaired EF. For example, children with medical conditions such as diabetes and sickle cell anemia show significant impairments in attention and EF tasks compared to children without those conditions [ 138 ].…”

Netherton syndrome; neuropsychological and psychosocial functioning of child and adult patients and their parents

“…This may have hampered their performance during testing. In the literature, this is also described in other pediatric chronic diseases as diabetes, congenital heart defects/disease, and sickle cell disease ( Compas et al, 2017 ). Moreover, these problems were found in adult patients with NS.…”

Improving neurodevelopment in infants with complex congenital heart disease

“…Developmentally supportive care refers to interventions that are individualized to the infant's needs and focused on minimizing infant stress response to optimize brain development (Butler, Huyler, Kaza, & Rachwal, 2017;Peterson & Evangelista, 2017;Sood et al, 2016). The brain maturity of term-born infants with CCHD is often similar to that of infants born prematurely at 34-35 weeks, and infants with CCHD have adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes similar to infants born prematurely (Andropoulos et al, 2010;Calderon & Bellinger, 2015;Compas, Jaser, Reeslund, Patel, & Yarboi, 2017;Licht et al, 2009). For these reasons, evidence from research with premature infants will be included.…”