Suspected Dyspraxia - OT assessment

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My DS (age 7) has an appointment with the Occupational Therapist next week about his coordination difficulties. I wondered if anyone who's been through this can tell me what to expect?

Backstory - we saw the consultant in the summer who suspected he may be dyspraxic and so referred us to OT as she said they were the ones who could assess/diagnose it. She did also refer us to physio to assess for hypermobility due to my family history although she didn't think it was that. Turns out he does have generalised hypermobility and low muscle tone so we've been doing exercises to help with that. I do feel as though there is a problem with motor-planning alongside his hypermobility but I don't know if they'll agree as he's not really severe.

Does anyone know what generally happens at these appointments? We've been told to bring examples of his writing and also bring some PE-type clothes for him to do exercises in. Just feeling apprehensive. A couple of people I know (who live in different areas to me) have been told "they don't diagnose dyspraxia anymore" and "if they have hypermobility they won't diagnose dyspraxia". Not sure if that's true everywhere.

It was lots of things like doing little pegs in peg boards, pulling treasure out of theraputty and the like with DD2. Then some ball catching and walking in a straight line etc - very very low key and she was happy to go along with all of it. Took an age to get the report back though (good couple of months)!

Just make sure that the report contains percentile scores and is really thorough. Our NHS paed will only diagnose dyspraxia if there are percentile scores. Our NHS OT won't put these in the reports and won't diagnose. We had to get private reports done to get this information.

Thank you both, I really appreciate it. I'm sure my DS will be happy doing the assessment stuff as he finds most things fun. It's just me that gets nervous! I will ask about the form the report will take while we're there.

Our OT and physio team were great. They do assessments for gross and fine motor, motor planning, attention span and ability to follow 3 step instructions, plus threading activity, drawing and writing etc.

Our paed team diagnosed from looking at this resulting 11 page report with percentiles and ruling out any other explanations for defecits. Paeds have over view so the reports are part of what they are looking at. They will weigh/measure the child in paeds and look at general health etc.

Report is useful as gives guidance on good activities for home/school. We now have motor skills 30 mins a day in school time for DS on the strength of it. Info gives more power to your elbow - Good luck! xxx

our report came within about 4 to 8 weeks I think x

hyper mobility can commonly cross over with dyspraxia and shouldn't be an excuse not to diagnose. DS has hypermobility in some finger joints for example.

Hope the assessment went well.

There does seem to have been a move away from diagnosing 'dyspraxia'. DS's official diagnosis from his assessment report is 'sensory processing disorder with neuromuscular developmental delay' but all of the therapists he sees and his school's SEN department still say it means he has dyspraxia.

Notmynom that's a bit weak.

There are no criteria for 'diagnosing' a sensory processing 'disorder'.
At the moment, the official guidelines are that sensory processing difficulties arise as part of lots of conditions (ASD comes to mind immediately). There is a push, particularly in the US, to establish criteria for stating it as a separate disorder.

NHS guidelines

Dyspraxia as a diagnostic term, is not technically correct, though most clinicians and teachers tend to use it, as it's familiar.
Developmental Co-ordination Disorder (DCD) is the developmental difficulty with acquiring motor skills.

There

Sorry posted before I finished.

If your child is 7+, and still has a difficulty with their movement skills, it really should be identified. And as Kiss said, there is lots that can be done to help, once you have a diagnosis.

I was shown the diagnostic manual by paediatrician and it had DCD with dyspraxia as specific under this umbrella. Our diagnosis is DCD and when I questioned 2 members of paediatric team said in practice the two terms are used interchangeably by educational and health teams.

Lots of websites to help - movement matters, fantastic dyspraxia and dyspraxia foundation come to mind. Watch out for little things like speech and language and eye movement problems and attentional difficulty which can all run alongside. You can ask for referrals from GP and paediatric team if needs be.

I'm confused now. DS is 10. He has seen GP, paediatrician and OT and that was the outcome. This was all done about a year ago.

He has weekly OT sessions, a programme of exercise to do at home, various measures in place in school. His co-ordination is improving as a result.

Are you saying I need to re-start the process?

Notmynom apologies, I didn't intend to confuse.

It depends on his scores on assessment, and his response to intervention.
If I had a child who's scores on the assessment were borderline, who had significant sensory processing difficulties, and who responded well to therapy, I likely wouldn't identify DCD.

Thanks to you all for sharing your experiences. We had the assessment and it was really thorough. Took about 1.5 hrs and included fine motor skills, gross motor skills, writing, visual perception etc. The report came after only a week which was much faster than expected! Had all the percentiles listed for the subtests and concluded that he seems to have some general motor coordination difficulties that can't be explained just through the hypermobility. So I guess that's basically dyspraxia/DCD although it doesn't specifically say that.

However, I met with the SENCO at his school today and while they've got lots of the stuff she recommended lined up to try with him - like writing slope and starting typing games etc, they're more concerned about him in other areas at school :-( He's crying a lot and sometimes struggles to stop :-( Major problems with organisation. Concern about his social skills - he's always been happy playing on his own if there's no one around but they're noticing a difference now with his social skills compared to others his age. He'll play with others if they want to play his game but otherwise he's not interested - not very flexible or adaptive. He's got an amazing imagination so has always been a dreamer but he's going into his own head a lot so not listening or concentrating. And memory - he still can't remember the names of a lot of the teaching staff / head teacher / TA who does his spellings every day and doesn't know the names of half his classmates. The SENCO asked if we were going to see the paediatrician again who referred us to the OT and I'm not sure but she suggested it might be worth phoning them and saying that the school have raised additional concerns so I'm going to phone tomorrow. Just a bit thrown by it all. I thought we'd finally sussed things out.

Any thoughts? I've never thought he was on the autistic spectrum because of his imagination and he's got a wicked sense of humour. But he does have some very specific interests which he wants to focus on and has had some sensory issues over the years. I don't know if these are just all additional signs of dyspraxia?

If it is DCD/Dyspraxia, then there are lots of other difficulties that can also occur as part of the picture.
It's neurological condition, in which motor development is the diagnostic feature, but there are specific learning difficulties that commonly co-exist.

Organisational skills tend to be weak- if it's difficult for the child to organise movement, then s/he may have difficulty organising their belongings/time/thoughts e.g. how to plan a project, or lay out their timetable for study etc etc.
Not insurmountable- with structure and overtly teaching organisational skills, children do really well.

And, IMO, knowing that it's a difficulty they have rather than feeling stupid or "wrong" makes it easier to put in the extra effort.

If there are a lot of other difficulties, then a Psychology report can be really useful to show up processing speed, working memory difficulties. auditory processing difficulties etc.

Socially, it might be an issue of timing, self regulation etc which is part of dcd OR it may be that he is also at the higher end of the autistic spectrum.

ASD and dyspraxia often go hand in hand. We can have a wicked sense of humour and great imaginations, but the imagination tends to be rigid and literal. For example, if my daughter has a Disney teddy she can imagine it's that character and interact with it as such but if you give her a teddy and ask her to pretend it's a baby she can't because it's a teddy.

My daughter (9) was diagnosed with DCD about a year ago, but has a lot of additional issue going alongside with it - sensory processing issues (but can't get a full sensory assessment done on the NHS although paediatrician agrees she needs one), also suffers from anxiety and organisational skills are virtually non-existent. We're also currently querying dyscalculia as her maths skills are very poor.
My advice would be to keep pushing for further investigations if you're thinking that it doesn't just fit into the one pigeon hole diagnosis which is what it feels like sometimes. Conditions like DCD/Dyspraxia often go hand in hand with other conditions such as ADHD/ASD/Dyslexia as they are all neurologically linked.

We ended up self-referring to CAMHS due to the anxiety issues, and they've been brilliant :-)

Sorry I'm so crap at replying to the replies on this thread! Life keeps getting in the way but I do appreciate all the responses. @MumUnderTheMoon - that's interesting what you say because I always thought my DS was very good at that sort of thing, i.e. when he was very little I had an old breastfeeding pillow that he decided was a crab and he then invented a whole story about this crab. He would do stuff like that a lot - like we drove past a field where there was a crop sprayer and he was like, "Ooh it looks like a whale!"

I've just joined the Dyspraxia Foundation and am reading through all the info on there which is helpful and I've spoken to the paediatrician's secretary and she's going to see if she can book us in again to go through these new concerns raised by the school so at least stuff is in motion now.