Developmental coordination disorder and cerebral visual impairment: What is the association?

Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) experience impairments beyond motor planning, affecting visual perceptual and visual-motor integration abilities, similar to children with Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI), making it challenging to distinguish between the two conditions. This study aimed to identify convergences and divergences in the clinical, neuropsychological, and functional vision-related skills of children with DCD and CVI.

An assessment of the neuropsychological profile (cognitive, visual cognitive, and motor coordination skills) and visual acuity were conducted on 65 children with DCD (mean age: 8 years, 1 month; SD: 1 year, 6 months) and 35 children with CVI (mean age: 8 years, 5 months; SD: 2 years, 6 months) and compared between the two groups. The CVI-Inventory (CVI-I) was used to evaluate functional vision-related problems and to cluster subjects.

Visual attention, visual perception, global motor coordination, and visual constructive scores didn't differ between the two groups even if children with CVI showed lower scores in the intellectual, visual, visual cognitive, and motor abilities. The overlap index confirmed an overlap on most of the variables considered. Six discriminative questions from the CVI-I clustered subjects into two groups: the first, with more children with CVI (62.9 %) and a more compromised neuropsychological profile, and the second, with more children with DCD (86.7 %).

DCD and CVI share both similarities and differences. Low visual acuity, low IQ scores, severe visual-motor integration challenges, and difficulties with fine motor and balance skills should prompt clinicians to screen for CVI in children with DCD. Specific functional vision-related problems can assist in this differentiation.