Teaching after 12

After the age of twelve:

·         Tendency towards negligent, careless, sometimes incomprehensible writing.

·         Grammar inconsistencies and orthographic mistakes, sometimes permanent omissions, changes and additions, just like mentioned at the previous step.

·         Difficulty to plan and write stories and all kinds of written compositions.

·         Tendency to confound oral instructions and phone numbers.

·         Great difficulty in learning foreign languages.

·         Low self-esteem.

·         Difficulty in perception of the language, like in the case of following instructions.

·         Poor reading comprehension.

·         Occurrence of disruptive behavior or progressive seclusion, sometimes leading to depression.

·         Aversion towards reading and writing.

All these disorders that start during infancy, childhood or adolescence require treatment as quick as possible, in order to avoid a great amount of suffering for the child and his family, and to ensure higher chances of improving the quality of his life.

The neurocognitive evaluation allows us to carry investigations at different levels, from syndromic to physiopathologic and etiologic.

Syndromic investigations let us evaluate the constituent signs and symptoms and lead us to consider a presumptive diagnosis of a clinical syndrome that must later be confirmed by specific evidence of academic difficulties. Neuropsychology plays an important role in helping us recognize the basic cerebral mechanisms that are involved in each case and, by associating them with physiopathologic studies, we get a complete picture, so that we can discern clear neuropsychological subtypes.

The possibility to include complementary studies that investigate cerebral structure – neuroimages, functional studies using radioactive compounds, PET (positron emission tomography), and SPECT-CBF (cerebral blood flow single photon emission computed tomography) – and cerebral functionality – neurophysiology, evoked potentials, cognitive potentials, quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG), analysis of the inter- and intra-hemispherical coherence – complete the third level of clinical investigation, essential for discovering the cause of the disorder, understanding the prognosis and also administering adequate treatment, tailored for each child.