FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 13, 2000
Contact: Anthony Venti, 603-650-7041 [email protected]
UNLOCKING THE MYSTERY AND MISDIAGNOSIS OF CAPD,CENTRAL AUDITORY PROCESSING DISORDER AT DARTMOUTH-HITCHCOCK MEDICAL CENTER
LEBANON, N.H. - A significant percentage of all school-age children may be incorrectly diagnosed as having ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), when, in fact, they have CAPD (central auditory processing disorder. The good news, according to Frank Musiek, Ph.D., Director of Audiology at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, is that CAPD is treatable if correctly diagnosed.
CAPD causes problems for children as they listen and try to understand sounds. Individuals can hear words spoken to them slowly, however, when many words and phrases are spoken along with background noise, these individuals are unable to clearly determine what was communicated. "It is hard for these individuals to distinguish foreground signals from background noise," said Musiek.
Students with the disorder may not be able to distinguish between long and short vowels. Musiek adds, "If kids don't learn the appropriate way to identify phonemes in the English language, then what happens is they do it in reverse. They begin to learn the whole word and then figure out what the components are. That works great until they're in fourth or fifth grade and then the words become too complex and all of a sudden their reading levels off." There are a variety of reasons for CAPD: brain lesions, traumatic brain injury, a history of chronic ear infections, learning disabilities, maturational delay, and in more mature adults, neurological changes due to aging.
Musiek believes that some cases of ADHD are really CAPD. The problems associated with ADHD tend to affect more than one of our senses, while in CAPD they are focused within the auditory system. "It is pretty clear now that many dyslexics have auditory processing problems," Musiek added.
Treatment is available for patients with CAPD. DHMC's therapy for CAPD patients consists of auditory training exercises and the integration of various listening and learning strategies. Depending on what the diagnostic tests indicate, children with CAPD may work on the discrimination of different speech sounds, such as vowels. They may also work on sequencing acoustic elements that are presented in various patterns. Other kinds of training may involve unique approaches to vocabulary building or slowing down various speech elements that are otherwise difficult to understand. Strategies for helping auditory memory such as transferring information from a written form to a sketch form have been very useful. Visual support, (watching for gestures and lip reading) for the auditory system can also help.
For more than 23 years, Dr. Musiek has been working on central auditory processing disorder at DHMC. He is currently part of a team of researchers involved in a study on the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (f-MRI). Dr. Musiek is hopeful this work, as well as new approaches to testing auditory speech perception, will demonstrate which sections of the brain become active during central or other types of auditory tasks.
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