Abstracts

To evaluate the oral and manual praxia in Benign Childhood Epilepsy with Centrotempotal Spikes (BECTS) compared with control group.
We studied 40 right-handed children (16 females, 24 males) with BECTS. They had 7-13 years old and were compared to a control group composed of children were close as possible in the matter of age at testing, sex and level with school. The control groups were composed of 154 children for assessment oral praxia and other 82 for assessment manual praxia. The oral praxia screening included: volitional tongue and lip, cheek and jaw movements isolation and sequence. The manual praxia was tested with single sequence of three movement and different sequence of two and three movement.
When analyzing the total subtests, the group of BECTS revealed abnormalities in 166 subtests (4.15 failure for child) and 191 subtests in the control group (1.13 failure for child). The was not any difference of age at testing, sex, level with school, laterality of EEG discharges, Illinois Test Psycholinguistic Ability and dichotic listening test. All subtests that examination oral and movement in sequence (seven of 78 subtests) revealed abnormalities in BECTS when compared with control group (Mann-Whitney U test, p[lt]0.001). Otherwise, didn[apos]t occur involving in phonemic production. In relation of manual praxia we found statistically significant difference of p[lt] 0.05 between BECTS group and control group in sequence of three differens movements (Mann-Whitney U test, p= 0.027) and single sequence of three movement (Mann-Whitney U test, p=0.007).
Children with BECTS showed oral and manual dyspraxia in comparision with the control group.