Inhibitory ability of children with developmental dyscalculia (DD) was investigated to explore the cognitive mechanism underlying DD. According to the definition of developmental dyscalculia, 19 children with DD-only and 10 children with DD&RD (DD combined with reading disability) were selected step by step, children in two control groups were matched with children in case groups by gender and age, and the match ratio was 1:1. Psychological testing software named DMDX was used to measure inhibitory ability of the subjects. The differences of reaction time in number Stroop tasks and differences of accuracy in incongruent condition of color-word Stroop tasks and object inhibition tasks between DD-only children and their controls reached significant levels (P<0.05), and the differences of reaction time in number Stroop tasks between dyscalculic and normal children did not disappear after controlling the non-executive components. The difference of accuracy in color-word incongruent tasks between children with DD&RD and normal children reached significant levels (P<0.05). Children with DD-only confronted with general inhibitory deficits, while children with DD&RD confronted with word inhibitory deficits only.

BACKGROUND: Dyslexia is the most common in the study of learning disabilities, it can affect various aspects of children, including behaviors,cognition, emotion, social adaptation, etc., and seriously block their obtaining of knowledge and improvement of ability in children.OBJECTIVE: To study the changing law of regional cerebral blood oxygenation in children with Chinese dyslexia in the process of recognizing Chinese characters, and investigate the neurophysiological basis of dyslexia in children.DESIGN: A case-control study.SETTING: Department of Child and Adolescent Health and Maternal Care, School of Public Health, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology.PARTICIPANTS: The study was carried out in Huazhong University of Science and Technology from June to September in 2003. Forty-five primary students of 8 to 12 years old, who were grade 3 to 5 in Wuhan city,were enrolled in this study, including 26 dyslexic children (dyslexia group)and 19 normal readers (control group). All the enrolled children were righthanded. Informed consents were obtained from all the participants and their parents (guardians) after explanation of aims and steps of this study.METHODS: The functional near-infrared imager (fNIRI) was applied to detect the changes of cerebral blood oxygenation in left prefrontal lobe of dyslexic children and normal children in the primary processing (viewing passively, reading aloud, producing an action word) and secondary processing of Chinese characters (outputting task, action words association) of Chinese characters.MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The changes of cerebral blood oxygenation in the primary processing and secondary processing of Chinese characters were observed in both groups.RESULTS: All the 26 children with Chinese dyslexia and 19 normal children were involved in the analysis of results. ① Changes of the contents of blood oxygenation in the primary processing of Chinese characters:When viewing the Chinese characters passively, the contents of blood oxygenation on channel A, B and C were all higher in the dyslexia group than in the control group (0.378 0, 0.134 6; 0.085 8, 0.051 9; 0.109 3, 0.069 2;P ＜ 0.05); there was no obvious difference on channel D between the two groups (P ＞ 0.05). When reading aloud, the contents of blood oxygenation on channel A, B, C and D were all unobviously higher in the dyslexia group than in the control group (P ＞ 0.05). In the process of generating action words, the contents of blood oxygenation on channels A and C were all higher in the dyslexia group than in the control group (0.411 2, 0.139 7;0.141 3, 0.078 4; P ＜ 0.05), and there were no obvious differences on channels B and D between the two groups (P ＞ 0.05). ② Changes of the contents of blood oxygenation in the secondary processing of Chinese characters: In the process of outputting task, the changes of blood oxygenation was lower in the dyslexia group than in the control group (-0.025 7, 0.089 0,F=16.25, P ＜ 0.01); In the process of action words association, the changes of blood oxygenation was obviously higher in the dyslexia group than in the control group (0.073 0, -0.072 1, F=15.59, P ＜ 0.01).CONCLUSION: The cortexes of left prefrontal lobe in dyslexic children are activated in the process of recognizing Chinese characters, but the degree and pattern of activation are different from those of normal children.The functional abnormalities of specific brain area may be the biological basis of Chinese dyslexia.Song RR, Wu HR.Changes of regional cerebral blood oxygenation in recognizing Chinese characters in children with Chinese dyslexia.

BACKGROUND: Mathematics ability is one of the basic abilities in human intelligence and mathematics disability is a universal type in key period of school-age children to master the mathematical concepts, perform the abstract calculation and form comprehensive mathematics ability, which is lack of a special rating scale and reference norm.OBJECTIVE: To establish a suitable evaluated norm for rating scale of pupil's basic mathematical abilities.DESIGN: Cross-sectional study of multi-phase stratified cluster random sampling.SETTING: The experiment was presided by Tongji Medical College collaborating with the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control of Beijing,Hebei province, Jiangsu province, shangdong province, Lengshuijiang,Hainan province and Hainan province, Herbin Medical University, Anhui Medical University, Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences, West China University of Medical Sciences, Guiyang Medical College, Lanzhou Medical College and other units.PARTICIPANTS: Totally 22 039 people were investigated in nationwide,including 14 693 students (7 377 urban ones and 7 316 ones, respectively), who were randomly selected from Grade One to Six of urban and rural general elementary schools.METHODS: Between June and September 2003, students from Grade One to Six of general elementary schools were sampled. According to the Fifth National Population Census in 2000 and based on sex, nation, area and city or count, the Chinese Rating Scale of Pupil's Mathematic Abilities was applied in group-test on mathematic abilities of the cluster-selected students with multi-phase-stratified sampling method.MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Calculative ability, logical thinking and spatial-visual abilities and so on.RESULTS: The norm samples of 14 693 subjects including 7 377 urban students and 7 316 rural students all entered the result analysis. ①The mean scores of each sub-test for the two sampled subjects gradiently increased along with grades rising; the scores of subtests among various ages from urban and rural samples (paired comparison) had significant differences (P ＜ 0.05); the scores of sub-tests of urban samples in various grades were higher than those of rural samples (t=2.234-11.766, P ＜ 0.05). The urban (n=7 377) and rural (n=7 316) norms were established, respectively.②The reference norm was composed of converted T score and percentile P,the T scores in every mid-term and final-term were estimated to calculate Z scores; finally, the probability function P under normal distribution was achieved. ③The evaluation of mathematics abilities were classified into 5 grades: it was average with the scores of (-x)±s (P=16%-84%); good if between (-x)+s and (-x)+2s (P=84%-97.5%); excellent if exceeded (-x)+2s(P ＞ 97.5%); inferior if between (-x)-s and (-x)-2s(P=16%-2.5%); worse if lower than (-x)-2s (P ＜ 2.5%).CONCLUSION: The constituent ratio of normal samples is basically consistent with the data of total population and the distribution of samples in various grades and sexes is nearly equilibrate; there are significant differences in scores of most subtests on mathematics abilities between urban and rural children, which suggest that it is necessary to establish urban and rural norm, respectively.

Objective: To assess the difference of priming effect in visual picture categorizing task between dyslexic children and normal children.Methods: Twenty-five dyslexic children and 50 control subjects(25 matched with chronological age and 25 matched with reading level) completed a masked picture priming experiment of pictorial stimuli.On each trial,a masked prime picture was briefly displayed.The participants were required to classify target stimuli as animal or nonanimal.Priming effect and response error rate between dyslexic children and normal children was analyzed.Results: The adjusted facilitation of congruent pairs of dyslexic children was 0.061,and the two controlled groups were 0.057 and 0.064 respectively.The differences between dyslexic children and controlled groups were not significant.Conclusion: Dyslexic children do not exhibit significant deficit in general object picture's features processing.

Objective:To investigate the regional cerebral blood oxygenation changes of left prefrontal lobe during dyslexic children recognizing Chinese characters. Methods:We use functional near-infrared imaging (fNIRI) technique to observe 28 dyslexic elementary school students and 19 healthy students who are not reading-impaired.Results:With fNIRI, significant activations were observed in the left prefrontal cortex of both dyslexic children and non-dyslexic children during primary processing of Chinese characters, and children with dyslexia were evoked more significantly ( P

Objective:To explore differences of graphic,phonological and semantic priming in Chinese character recognition between dyslexic children and normal children.Method:A priming paradigm was used to facilitate subjects to complete a lexical decision task.The differences of reaction time,priming effect and error rate between dyslexic children and normal children were analyzed.Results:The baseline adjusted facilitations of graphic,phonological and semantic priming in character recognition in dyslexic children were-0.010,-0.010,and 0.001 respectively.The dyslexic children even showed inhibition in graphic and phonological prime conditions.For the age control group the facilitations under the three prime conditions were 0.026,0.026 and 0.022.As for the reading level control group,results were 0.062,0.058 and 0.031 respectively.The differences of priming effects between dyslexic children and normal children were significant,especially in graphic and phonological priming conditions.The possible order of the three priming effects(from high to low)was:graphic,phonological and semantic.The interactions between reading ability and priming were not significant.Conclusion:Results from the present study suggest that there is a general deficit in graphic and phonological processing in character recognition in Chinese dyslexic children.This phenomenon can be interpreted by the connectionist model.

Objective:To explore the reading feature of developmental dyslexia. Methods:820 children of grade 3~5 in 5 primary schools in Wuhan City were selected by cluster sampling; fifty-five children with developmental dyslexia were screened out according to ICD-10. One hundred and ten normal children with the same age, sex and socioeconomic status were chose as control. Results:The prevalence rate of developmental dyslexia is 6.7%. The score of 8 items of DCCC (Dyslexia Checklist for Chinese Children) of developmental dyslexics were mostly significantly higher than that of normal children (15.2?3.7/10.1?3.3, 21.6?3.7/13.4?4.9, 16.1?3.5/10.6?3.7, 16.8?3.6/11.7?3.1, 15.9?3.9/11.5?3.5, 21.4?4.3/14.5?4.6, 14.9?3.7/9.4?2.8, 23.2?4.4/15.9?4.7, all withP

To get formed of the status of research and application of the domestic behavior therapy and its development trend, the time distribution and the subject distribution were bibliometrically analyzed of the literature on behavior therapy from 1981 to 2000 in the CBMdisc. Our results showed that the number of literature of behavior therapy has been increasing in exponential manner over the past 20 years; the behavior modification, the biofeedback and the cognitive therapy are extensively used in China. In clinical practice, the behavior modification and the biofeedback have been applied in all departments of medical institutions, especially for treating the cardiovascular and the neurological conditions. The cognitive therapy has been employed mainly for the treatment of mental disorders (or dysphrenia), the aversive therapy mainly for material withdrawal, and the systematic desensitization for phobia. There was no report found on the clinical use of meditation. It is concluded that the study and application in behavior therapy in China is currently developing very fast.
*Behavior Therapy/trends ; *Bibliometrics ; Biofeedback (Psychology) ; China ; Cognitive Therapy ; Heart Diseases/therapy ; Phobic Disorders/therapy ; Schizophrenia/*therapy

The deficiency theories of dyslexia are quite contradictory and the cross-cultural studies in recent years mainly focused on whether the dyslexics among cultures shared the same cognitive profile or just based on the language. This study used Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) imaging to measure the regional cerebral blood volume (BV) and the changes of cerebral activation in the left prefrontal cortex of 12 Chinese dyslexic children and their 12 age-matched normal controls during the Paced Visual Serial Addition Test (PVSAT). Results showed that the scores of PVSAT of dyslexic children were significantly lower than those of the normal children (t=3.33, P<0.01). The activations of the left prefrontal cortex in the normal group were significantly greater than those of dyslexic children (all P<0.01). Our results indicated that Chinese dyslexia had a general deficiency in working memory and this may be caused by the abnormal metabolic activity of brain blood volume in the left prefrontal cortex and the deficits in brain function might be the basis of neuropathology of Chinese dyslexia. Present study supports the difference on brain activation of dyslexics from different languages may be caused by the same cognitive system related to reading.

In order to study whether patients with schizophrenia have cerebral injury, neuron-specific enolase (NSE) and myelin basic protein (MBP)in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of 33 patients with first episode schizophrenia and 9 from the control group were determined by double antibody sandwich enzyme immunoassay method. The results showed that there was significant difference in the NSE contents between the experimental group and control group (P<0.01). The NSE contents in CSF in the experimental group were positively correlated with MBP in schizophrenia patients (P< 0. 05). These findings suggested that patients with schizophrenia had cerebral injury.