title: Hoarding behaviors in children with learning disabilities.
abstract: Our objective was to describe the prevalence, comorbidity, and neuropsychological profiles of children with hoarding and learning disabilities. From 61 children with learning disabilities, 16.4% exhibited hoarding as a major clinical issue. Although children with learning disabilities and hoarding displayed greater rates of obsessive-compulsive disorder (30%) as compared to those with learning disabilities without hoarding (5.9%), the majority of patients belonging to the former group did not display obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis. When learning disability patients with hoarding were compared to age-, sex-, and IQ-matched learning disability subjects without hoarding, hoarders exhibited a slower learning curve on word list-learning task. In conclusion, salient hoarding behaviors were found to be relatively common in a sample of children with learning disabilities and not necessarily associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, supporting its nosological independence. It is unclear whether underlying cognitive features may play a major role in the development of hoarding behaviors in children with learning disabilities.
authors.affiliation: Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, The University of Melbourne and Melbourne Health, Australia. rtesta@unimelb.edu.au. rtesta@unimelb.edu.au
authors.forename: Renée
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Testa
authors.forename: Christos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pantelis
authors.forename: Leonardo F
authors.initials: LF
authors.lastname: Fontenelle
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003192:Compulsive Behavior / Q000453:epidemiology*; D002658:Developmental Disabilities / Q000150:complications / Q000453:epidemiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007361:Intelligence Tests; D007859:Learning Disabilities / Q000150:complications / Q000453:epidemiology*; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D015995:Prevalence; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012189:Retrospective Studies