PND107 BODY-ORIENTED THERAPY HAS POSITIVE EFFECT ON VISUOSPATIAL ABILITIES IN CHILDREN WITH ADD

Abstract

it is known that children with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) have deficit of cognitive abilities. The goal of this study was to reveal effect of body-oriented therapy on visuospatial abilities in ADD children. We compared the efficacy of two methods of treatment (body-oriented therapy for children vs. conventional motor exercises) in a randomized controlled pilot study. 16 children with ADD between 6 to 8 years of age were included and randomly assigned to treatment conditions according to a 2×2 cross-over design. The body-oriented therapy included the exercises from yoga and breathing techniques. To assess the visuospatial in children we used 4 subtests from NEPSY (Arrows, Block Construction, Design Copying and Route Finding). Effects of treatment were analyzed by means of an ANOVA for repeated measurements. The ANOVA has revealed (p<.05) that for Block Construction subtest the body-oriented therapy was superior to the conventional motor training, with high range effect size (0.83). We did not find this result for Arrows, Design Copying and Route Finding subtests. The findings from this pilot study suggest that body-oriented therapy has a specific positive effect on the reconstruction of 3-dimensional designs in children with ADD. However, it is necessary to do further research into the impact of body-oriented therapies on the cognitive abilities in ADD children.