[Intelligence assessment using the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children: a pilot study of a sample of children with language development disorders].

The German version of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, which will soon be available commercially, was administered to 29 children with developmental speech and language disorders between 7;4 and 11;11 years of age who were patients on an inpatient child psychiatry unit. The correlations of the test results with the WISC-R (German version), the AID (a German intelligence test) and the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices were calculated; furthermore, an assessment was made for differences in performance on tasks requiring sequential processing and those requiring simultaneous processing. The results of the study indicate that the K-ABC enables a relatively broad-based assessment of cognitive development in speech-and language-disordered children despite the children's verbal handicaps and that the instrument yields information of relevance in planning remedial programs.

[Disorders of short-term memory, a necessary category in the multiaxial classification scheme?].

Problems with short-term memory have been reported in conjunction with numerous psychiatric disorders of childhood. Deficits in both visual and auditory short-term memory were found more frequently in a group of 23 children between the ages of 7 and 11 years with specific developmental speech and/or language disorders and in an unselected group of 23 children seen at the inpatient unit of a child psychiatry facility than in a control group of children of comparable age and sex without language or behavior problems. Because of the diagnostic and therapeutic relevance of visual and auditory short-term memory deficits, the authors argue for the inclusion of the disorder in the Multi-axial Classification Scheme.

Prevalence and treatment of psychiatric disorders in 3 to 14-year-old children: results of a representative field study in the small town rural region of Traunstein, upper Bavaria.

In a representative sample (n = 358) 18.4% of the children aged 3 to 14 were classified as having psychiatric disorders, mostly special symptoms (13.4%) (ICD 307).

[The treatment of children with psychiatric disorders by general practitioners and paediatricians in South-East Bavaria (author's transl)].

The treatment of children and juveniles with psychiatric disorders is seen as a problem of case identification. Paediatricians and general practitioners can treat behavior disorders of best together with a child psychiatrist.