Dyspraxia USA Raises Awareness of "Hidden Handicap"

PRLog (Press Release) - Aug 05, 2009 -
Chicago, Ill. – Once known as “clumsy child syndrome” or “congenital maladroitness,” Developmental Dyspraxia is a neurologically-based disorder that affects motor planning and execution. In other words, Dyspraxia inhibits a person’s ability to plan a physical movement in order to carry out an idea or action. First diagnosed in the early twentieth-century, Dyspraxia is recognized by the World Health Organization as a Specific Developmental Disorder of Motor Function. Despite this recognition, it remains one of the most under-diagnosed and under-treated developmental disorders in the United States .

Dyspraxia USA (http://www.dyspraxiausa.org/) works to raise awareness of this disorder which affects as many as 10% of all children, most of them male, according to the WHO’s Diagnostics and Statistics Manual - IV. Many consider Dyspraxia a hidden handicap because children with Dyspraxia may appear no different from their peers, until new skills are tried or known ones taken out of context. In many affected children, Dyspraxia occurs with or as part of other neurological conditions so that defining common symptoms may be confusing. Additionally, in some children, the condition manifests itself sporadically, affecting a child one day, but not the next, seeming almost as if information needed by the brain to process an action has been “misfiled.”

Addiitonally, Dyspraxia may affect any or all areas of development - physical, intellectual, emotional, social, language, and sensory - and may impair the normal process of learning, thus also falls into the category of Learning Disorder. It is not a unitary disorder (like measles or chicken pox, where all those affected share a common set of symptoms), and affects each person in different ways at different ages and stages of development, and to varying degrees.

Launched in 2005, by Warren Fried, who himself suffers from Developmental Dyspraxia, Dyspraxia USA has quickly become the leading clearinghouse in the United States for information on this condition. Fried and a host of volunteers – many of them parents of dyspraxic children  or adults who suffer from the condition themselves – work tirelessly to raise public awareness of the condition and to educate people about diagnosis,  treatments and resources to improve the quality of life for people with Dyspraxia and their families.

To learn more about Developmental Dyspraxia or to schedule an interview with Warren Fried, please contact Dawn Sloan-Downes at 404.932.4119 or via e-mail at dsdcreative@gmail.com.