Purpose

Children diagnosed with a brain tumor (BT) in the first years of their life are at high risk of cognitive and neuropsychological problems, more school difficulties, and an increased need for educational support. To improve this condition, it will be beneficial to be able to identify the neuropsychological variables that are early predictors of school competences at later ages.

Methods

We longitudinally assessed 30 school-age BT children with a diagnosis before the age of 5 who were administered cognitive and neuropsychological evaluations before entering school or in the first 2 school years and who were followed up for academic performance at least one year after the first evaluation. A discriminant function analysis was conducted to detect the early neuropsychological profile that best predicted those children who turned out to need school support or not; we tested 5 block multiple regression models, one for each academic variable entering as predictors the neuropsychological variables that significantly discriminated the two groups.

Results

A total of 93.3% of the cases were correctly classified according to the discriminant function in “with vs. without” educational support. Visual attention abilities were highly correlated with resulting school problems, both for reading (accuracy and speed) and math (operations) at school age.

Conclusions

Analysis provided evidence that the early neuropsychological profile may predict academic difficulties for both reading and math at school age and that visual attention seems to play an important role in both these academic abilities, allowing clinicians to identify children with major difficulties in/from early years and to intervene beforehand.

中文翻译：

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被诊断出患有脑肿瘤的儿童的早期神经心理特征预示了其在学龄期的学术困难。

目的

在生命的头几年被诊断出患有脑瘤（BT）的儿童处于认知和神经心理学问题的高风险中，更多的学校困难以及对教育支持的需求增加。为了改善这种情况，将能够识别神经心理学变量，这些变量是较晚年龄的学校能力的早期预测者，这将是有益的。

方法

我们纵向评估了30名诊断在5岁之前的适龄BT儿童，他们在入学前或前2个学年接受了认知和神经心理学评估，并在首次评估后至少一年接受了学习成绩的随访。进行了判别功能分析，以发现能最好地预测那些需要或不需要学校支持的孩子的早期神经心理学特征。我们测试了5块多元回归模型，每个学术变量都输入一个作为预测变量的神经心理学变量，该变量显着区分了两组。

结果

根据“有或没有”教育支持中的判别功能，正确分类了总共93.3％的案例。视觉注意能力与所导致的学校问题高度相关，包括学龄期的阅读（准确性和速度）和数学（操作）。

结论

分析提供了证据，表明早期的神经心理学特征可以预测学龄儿童在阅读和数学方面的学习困难，并且视觉注意力似乎在这两种学习能力中都起着重要作用，从而使临床医生可以识别早年和以后的主要困难儿童。事先进行干预。