Sensory Integration of the Tactile Sensory System of Children with Developmental Disabilities

Sensory integration is the organization of the senses for their use. It is a neuro-biological activity that allows the reception and processing of sensory information, which in large quantities from the senses come to the brain, at all times. The aim of the study is to examine the prevalence of sensory integration difficulties of the tactile sensory system of children with developmental disabilities, and to establish the statistical significance of differences in relation to the type of difficulty. The total sample of respondents (N=60) consisted of four subsamples of 15 respondents, namely; children with autism, children with Down syndrome, children with hearing impairment and children with sight impairment. The Mann-Whitney U test and the Wilcoxon W test at the level of statistical significance of p<0.05 were used to test the statistical significance of the differences between the subsamples of the subjects. The results of the study show that 86.67% of children with autism, 66.67% of children with Down syndrome, 20% of children with hearing impairment and 40% of children with sight impairment have difficulties with sensory integration of the tactile system. Children with hearing impairment (Rank M 43.97), children with sight impairment (Rank M 35.03), children with Down syndrome, and children with autism (Rank M 14.93) show the least difficulty in sensory integration of the tactile sensory system. There is a statistically significant difference in the difficulties of sensory integration of the tactile sensory system between children with autism, children with Down syndrome, children with hearing impairment and children with sight impairment at the level of statistical significance of p<0.05

Prevalence of 1691G>A FV mutation in Poland compared with that in other Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European countries

The 1691G>A FV variant has been described as a common genetic risk factor in venous thromboembolism. The purpose of this study was to provide a further frequency value for 1691G>A FV in Poland and to collate summary data from Central (Poland, Czech, Slovakia), Eastern (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine) and South-Eastern (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria) European countries. For this purpose in 2007 the 1691G>A FV variant was analyzed by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism from DNA collected in 2005-2006. We studied 650 subjects: 400 newborns and 250 older individuals (mean age 46.1 y) from Poland and compared results with reports from other countries, as well as with the frequency trend of 845G>A HFE across South-Eastern European countries using centroid cities. From our 1691G>A FV study we identified 626 GG homozygotes, 23 GA heterozygotes, and i AA homozygote (n = 650), giving an A allele frequency of 1.9%, and a summed frequency value for Poland of 2.0% (n = 1588); the frequency in Central European countries was 3.9% (n = 4559), mostly due to the high value in the Czech Republic: 5.1% (n = 2819); the South-Eastern European countries had 2.5% (n = 2410). Among the Eastern European countries the 1691G>A FV allele frequency was 1.9% (n=791), between the South-Eastern and Eastern European countries there was no significant difference (p=0.17). We confirm that the 1691G>A FV allele frequency in Poland, as well as other countries compared, is significantly lower than that in Czech