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Nancy Potter, assistant professor of speech and hearing sciences at Washington State University, spent last summer testing 33 children in 12 different states. She evaluated the children using a three-hour battery of speech, language, cognitive and motor tests. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the travel and testing are part of a study on communication disorders in children with galactosemia, a rare disorder that affects one in 53,000 people in the United States.

Galactosemia is a genetic disease that is detected during newborn screening and is fatal if left undiagnosed. Children who have galactosemia are unable to tolerate galactose, a sugar found in all human and animal milk.

Potter is interested in these children because more than half of them have speech disorders, typically diagnosed as apraxia, the inability to plan and program the mouth and tongue movements needed for speech. Her goal is to examine markers of apraxia and determine the nature and relationship of co-occurring speech, language and motor disorders in children who have classic galactosemia.

Although not all data have been analyzed, data from a pilot study she conducted in 2005 suggest that the risk of language disorders occurring together with speech disorders may be up to five times greater in galactosemic children than in children whose speech disorders are of unknown origin. She also discovered that individual children with galactosemia have very different patterns of significant speech, language and motor impairments.

Potter can be reached at 509-368-6894 or nlpotter@wsu.edu.

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