Can Self-reported Ocular Motor and Perceptive Alterations Predict a Reading Disability? A Pilot Study on the Analytic Anamnestic Protocol

Introduction Early diagnosis is the main requisite when dealing with subjects suspected to suffer from neurodevelopmental disorders, especially reading disability. In this respect, self-reports are a promising tool and could prove to be as reliable as ordinary screenings, with the advantage of low cost and low time consumption. Since the last decades, the perceptual and visuomotor function are believed to be involved in the pathogenesis of developmental dyslexia; therefore, specific elements related to an alteration of the sensorial and visuomotor domain in the familial and personal medical history could reveal a risk to develop this condition at a pre-examination phase. Yet, rather than evaluating the perceptual and motor function, the self-reports presented so far investigate the presence of dyslexia traits and comorbidities in parents, relatives, and in the sons. The Analytic Anamnestic Protocol (AAP), specifically devised to assess the perceptual and visuomotor function in children, revealed higher visuomotor and sensorial scores in samples suffering from congenital cerebral lesions, Down syndrome, and reading disability compared to a control group. Sensibility and specificity were acceptable, as shown by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. In this paper, a modified version of the AAP (the AAP2) targeting more specifically developmental dyslexics is presented, along with the preliminary results obtained in a group of school-age disabled readers. Methods The AAP2 is made of 25 questions divided into four sections (family, general, past and recent specialist medical history). In addition, seven questions inquiring about aspects related to the lexical difficulties (developmental dyslexia (DD) section) have been included. Like the previous version, each answer is assigned a perceptive and visuomotor score. The self-report was administered to 37 normal subjects (median age: nine years), and 34 dyslexic children (median age: eight and a half years). Results Visuomotor and sensory scores in the dyslexic sample was consistently higher than in the controls in the recent specialist medical history and in the DD section (Welch test: visuomotor (VM) t = 7.02, p < .0001; sensory (VS) t = 7.39, p < .0001) with the visuosensory domain more involved than the visuomotor function (T-test: t = 4.70, p < .0001, and t = 7.06, p < .0001, respectively). The sensibility and specificity of the recent specialist medical history of the AAP was 94.12% and 77.78%, respectively. Sensibility and specificity of the DD section DD were 100% and 80%, respectively. Conclusion The AAP2 is a promising tool to screen subjects at risk for developmental dyslexia at the beginning of primary school. Like the previous version (also in this modified questionnaire), the main weakness remains the heuristic criterion adopted for the assignment of the scores.