Assessment and psychotherapeutic intervention for an HIV-infected preschool child.

Pediatric acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is becoming more common. Moreover, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) positive status in multiple family members is common and complicates disease management. Practitioners treating these children are often unaware of the effect of the virus on the child's psychological, cognitive, and emotional functioning. In addition, children with AIDS frequently come from families facing pressing social problems, including homelessness, poverty, and drug addiction. HIV-positive children thus confront such diverse issues as the deterioration of developmental skills, social ostracism, and the possibility of imminent death, placing them in a socioemotional crisis. This paper presents a comprehensive psychotherapeutic intervention for such children.

Learning disability assessed through audiologic and physiologic measures: a case study.

This report describes a child with central auditory dysfunction. Audiologic tests (Willeford Battery and Staggered Spondaic Word Test) indicate a brain-stem dysfunction but normal cortical functioning. Electrophysiologic tests corroborated these results. Brain-stem auditory-evoked responses (BAERs) indicated an absent contralateral peak III bilaterally when stimulating each ear separately. This is the first reported case where brain-stem dysfunction on audiologic tests were associated with specific electrophysiologic changes in the BAER.