Introduction: Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common cause of physical disability in children, with an estimated 600-700 infants born with CP in Australia each year. CP is typically associated with motor impairments, but nearly half of all children with CP also experience cognitive impairment, potentially impacting educational and vocational achievement. This paper reports the protocol for a randomised controlled trial of a computerised cognitive training intervention based on behavioural principles: Strengthening Mental Abilities through Relational Training (SMART). The study aims to investigate SMART's effect on fluid reasoning, executive function and academic achievement in children with CP.
Methods And Analysis: Sixty children with mild to moderate CP (Gross Motor Function Classification Scale I-IV) aged between 8 years and 12 years will be recruited. Participants will be randomly allocated to two groups: SMART cognitive training and waitlist control. Families will access the programme at home over a 4-month period. Assessments will be administered at baseline, 20 weeks and at 40 week follow-up for retention. The primary outcome will be fluid intelligence, while academic achievement, executive function and social and emotional well-being will be secondary outcomes.
Ethics And Dissemination: This study has approval from the Children's Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service Research Ethics Committee (HREC/14/QRCH/377) and The University of Queensland (2017001806). If the computerised cognitive training programme is found to be effective, dissemination of these findings would assist children with CP by providing an accessible, cost-effective intervention that can be completed at home at the individual's own pace.
Registration Details: The study was registered prospectively on 10 November 2017 to present. Recruitment is now under way, and we aim to complete recruitment by June 2019, with data collection finalised by March 2020.
Trial Registration Number: ACTRN12617001550392; Pre-results.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
---|---|
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6561461 | PMC |
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-028505 | DOI Listing |
J Physician Assist Educ
January 2025
Tonya C. George, PhD, MSHS, MSPH, PA-C, DFAAP, is a assistant professor, Doctor of Medical Science Program, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia.
Neurodiversity, encompassing conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and dyslexia, represents a significant and often under-recognized segment of the population, including within science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine fields like medicine. Neurodiverse individuals possess unique skills, including enhanced creativity, analytical thinking, and meticulous attention to detail, which are valuable in health care professions. However, failure to recognize and support these individuals can result in missed opportunities, social isolation, and mental health challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Clin Health Psychol
January 2025
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Department of Psychology, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil.
Objectives: With increasing global life expectancy, cognitive interventions hold promise in mitigating cognitive decline and fostering healthy aging. Despite the demand for evidence-based interventions, there have been few attempts to summarize existing evidence. This study aims to assess the effectiveness and feasibility of unimodal and multimodal cognitive interventions for cognitively healthy older adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndian J Occup Environ Med
December 2024
Department of Occupational Medicine, Industrial Diseases Research Center, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran.
Background: Different domains of cognitive function are important in some jobs, such as office work. Ergonomic risk factors may affect cognitive function.
Aim: This study was designed to assess the effect of an ergonomic training intervention on the cognitive function of office workers.
iScience
January 2025
Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China.
Learned action sequences are suggested to be organized hierarchically, but how the various hierarchical levels are processed by different cortical regions remains largely unknown. By training monkeys to perform heterogeneous saccade sequences, we investigated the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) in sequence planning and execution. The electrophysiological recording revealed that sequence-level initiation information was mostly signaled by DLPFC neurons, whereas subsequence-level transition was largely encoded by LIP neurons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnimals survive in dynamic environments changing at arbitrary timescales, but such data distribution shifts are a challenge to neural networks. To adapt to change, neural systems may change a large number of parameters, which is a slow process involving forgetting past information. In contrast, animals leverage distribution changes to segment their stream of experience into tasks and associate them with internal task abstracts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!