Speech-Language-Hearing Therapy in a Pediatric Patient with Neuropsychological Dysfunction after Cerebral Encephalopathy

Abstract

A sixteen-year-old girl with neuropsychological dysfunction after cerebral encephalopathy came to our hospital for evaluation of her cognitive impairment and ability to acquire compensatory skills for communicative dysfunction. Neuropsychological examinations revealed low scores on FSIQ, VCI, WMI and PSI by WISC-Ⅳ. We intervened using a process-orientated speech-language-hearing therapy to improve her cognitive, language and communicative skills for a year. After that, we evaluated her cognitive ability by WISC-Ⅳ and LCSA. As a result of our intervention, her word knowledge, idiom and mental expression, sentence expression and reading social condition and expression scores in LCSA performance were improved but each IQ by WISC-Ⅳ was preserved. In ST intervention for pediatric neuropsychological dysfunction, the patient evaluation should be made not only using IQ by WISC-IV but also by measuring other communicative skills such as by LCSA.