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Page 1 of 3 There's a boat sailing outside the kitchen, and Ryan Murphy Strom is perched on a chair, peering at it through his telescope. He secures the ship - a couch with paper sails - with a rope and bravely battles pirates with his plastic sword.
Ryan, 7, a second-grader at Niwot Elementary, has been known to ask penetrating questions: "Was there a time before time? Will future generations consider us less than human?"
But the boy used to have a more troubling side to his precocious and imaginative nature, his parents say. He threw tantrums when asked to switch tasks, like moving from playing to eating dinner. While watching television, he plugged his ears, even if the sound wasn't loud for others. He often was distracted and had trouble completing simple tasks, such as getting dressed.
"It didn't feel good inside," Ryan says. "It felt like I was going to explode."
When he was 4, Ryan was diagnosed with sensory integration dysfunction, now typically called sensory processing disorder. He recently underwent therapy, which lessened the symptoms, his parents say.
Children with the disorder have trouble perceiving, organizing and processing information from different senses, which can include touch, sound, vision, hearing, position, movement, smell and taste. Although symptoms vary, those with the disorder might be unable to screen out unimportant information - such as the soft purr of a refrigerator motor - or they might seem unaware of extreme sensations, such as pain from walking on burning pavement with bare feet.
Others strike out if someone bumps them, or throw tantrums if asked to do "messy play" such as finger-painting or playing in the sand. They might become confused on how to crawl out of a playground tunnel or afraid to step up on a curb.
"We tend to look at these children and think, 'Why isn't he doing the obvious?' " says Carol Stock Kranowitz, author of "The Out-of-Sync Child," and "The Out-of-Sync Child Has Fun."
The disorder appears to affect 5 percent of children, according to a pilot study that will be published this year in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy, says Lucy Miller, author of the study and an associate professor of rehabilitation medicine and pediatrics at University of Colorado's Health Sciences Center in Denver.
Although sensory processing disorder often occurs in children who are otherwise typical, it's also commonly found in gifted children and in those with autism, attention deficit disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome, Fragile X syndrome and sometimes Down syndrome.
No one knows exactly what is happening in the brains of those with the disorder, but Miller says research points to problems in the cortex. The cause of the disorder is unknown, though experts think genetics is a factor. babies in under-stimulating environments - such as inattentive orphanages - or those in over-stimulating environments, such as premature babies in intensive care, also may be prone to the disorder, Kranowitz says.
Although sensory processing disorder was first noted by occupational therapist Dr. A. Jean Ayers in the early 1960s, the disorder isn't listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV, a standard reference physicians and psychologists use to diagnose developmental and behavioral disorders.
"There is doubt in the scientific community on whether (sensory processing disorder) is real," says Miller, who is lobbying to get the disorder into the manual. "And that's because there hasn't been enough research."
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