BACKGROUND No explanation for moderate to severe mental retardation is apparent in about 40% of cases. Although small chromosomal rearrangements may account for some undiagnosed cases, a lack of genome-wide screening methods has made it impossible to ascertain the frequency of such abnormalities. METHODS A fluorescence in-situ hybridisation (FISH) test was used to examine the integrity of chr...

Introduction: Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is one of the most prevalent genetic causes of developmental disability, representing the most frequent form of inherited severe cognitive deficit. The present study was undertaken to investigate FXS and its prevalence in moderate mentally retarded people in patients. Materials and methods: Nineteen people with moderate mental retardation (MR) who wer...

We present a syndrome manifested in two half brothers and their two maternal aunts which is characterised in the two boys by severe mental retardation and craniofacial dysmorphism (broad, coarse features and marked plagiocephaly with flattened occiput), and in the aunts merely by moderate mental retardation without dysmorphic features. The brothers do not seem to fall into any previously descri...

A rationale and a method are presented for estimating the prevalence of mental retardation in individual catchment areas. The method incorporates the adaptive behavior criterion of the AAMD definition of mental retardation and proposes prevalence rates based on chronological age and degree of impairment. Special focus is given to the population with moderate to profound mental retardation. a me...

Aim and objectives The prime aim of this research was to examine the effects of music on learning and educational performances on mentally disabled students. Context Let us be briefed on a definition of mental disability, as referred to in psychiatry as retardation. In psychiatry there are two types of retardation, mental retardation and psychomotor retardation. Mental retardation refers to slo...

Genetic abnormalities frequently give rise to a mental retardation phenotype. Recent advances in resolution of comparative genomic hybridization and genomic sequence annotation has identified new syndromes at chromosome 3q29 and 9q34. The finding of a significant number of copy number polymorphisms in the genome in the normal population, means that assigning pathogenicity to deletions and dupli...

The integration of adults with mental retardation into community leisure services has become an accepted focus of community leisure service providers. Researchers and practitioners alike have discovered that participation in integrated recreation programs provides adults with mental retardation opportunities to acquire a variety of functional leisure and social skills. However, without specific...

Mental retardation (MR) is a common form of cognitive impairment among children. The underlying causes of mental retardation are extremely heterogeneous and include significant genetic factors. Long chain fatty acid-CoA ligase 4 is the first gene shown to be involved in mental retardation and fatty-acid metabolism. FACL4 gene mutations in three Italian MR pedigrees have been reported as causing...

AIM To identify cryptic subtelomeric rearrangement, a possible cause of idiopathic mental retardation by means of multiprobe telomere fluorescent in situ hybridization (T-FISH). METHODS Hundred patients (median age 3.0 years) with mental retardation and dysmorphic features were screened using specific T-FISH probes. Multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification and comparative genomic hybr...

Previous work based on observations of home videotapes indicates that differences can be detected between infants with autism spectrum disorder and infants with typical development at 1 year of age. The present study addresses the question of whether autism can be distinguished from mental retardation by 1 year of age. Home videotapes of first birthday parties from 20 infants later diagnosed wi...