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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A new study suggests children with autism lag behind their classmates in the area of handwriting and can benefit from targeted therapies to improve those skills.
The study, conducted in Minnesota, involved 28 children between the ages of 8 and 13. Half of the children had autism, and half had no developmental, psychiatric or brain disorders. All children scored within a normal IQ range.
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Handwriting criteria were divided into five categories: legibility, alignment, size, spacing and form. Research shows half of the children with autism scored lower than 80 percent of the total points on the handwriting portion compared to one child in the group without autism. Children with autism also scored poorly on the form category of the assessment.
Our results suggest that therapies targeting motor skills may help improve handwriting in children with autism, which is important for success in school and building self-esteem," study author Amy Bastian, Ph.D., of the Kennedy Krieger Institute and John Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, M.D., was quoted as saying. Such therapies could include training of letter formation and general training of fine motor control to help improve the quality of their writing."
SOURCE: Neurology, November 10, 2009
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