Effects of Diabetic Ketoacidosis on Visual and Verbal Neurocognitive Function in Young Patients Presenting with New-Onset Type 1 Diabetes.

Objective: To evaluate the effects of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) on neurocognitive functions in children and adolescents presenting with new-onset type 1 diabetes.

Methods: Newly diagnosed patients were divided into two groups: those with DKA and those without DKA (non-DKA). Following metabolic stabilization, the patients took a mini-mental status exam prior to undergoing a baseline battery of cognitive tests that evaluated visual and verbal cognitive tasks.

Self-ordered pointing in children with autism: failure to use verbal mediation in the service of working memory?

This study tested the hypothesis that children with autism are impaired in using verbal encoding and rehearsal strategies in the service of working memory. Participants were 24 high-ability, school-age children with autism and a comparison group matched on verbal and non-verbal IQ, receptive and expressive vocabulary, and visual memory. Working memory was assessed using verbal and non-verbal variants of a non-spatial, self-ordered pointing test [Petrides, M.

The relationship between standardized measures of language and measures of spontaneous speech in children with autism.

This study investigated the relationship between scores on standardized tests (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals [CELF], Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Third Edition [PPVT-III], and Expressive Vocabulary Test) and measures of spontaneous speech (mean length of utterance [MLU], Index of Productive Syntax, and number of different word roots [NDWR]) derived from natural language samples obtained from 44 children with autism between the ages of 4 and 14 years old. The children with autism were impaired across both groups of measures. The two groups of measures were significantly correlated, and specific relationships were found between lexical-semantic measures (NDWR, vocabulary tests, and the CELF lexical-semantic subtests) and grammatical measures (MLU, and CELF grammar subtests), suggesting that both standardized and spontaneous speech measures tap the same underlying linguistic abilities in children with autism.