When my 12-year-old son and I read about the cerebellum in his human body encyclopedia a few years ago we wondered if there was a connection. The cerebellum receives input from the sensory systems and from other parts of the brain and spinal cord and integrates these inputs to fine tune motor activity. He has mild motor dyspraxia and dysgraphia that improved as he got older, mild hypotonia that affects his endurance and mild sensory issues that don't cause major behavior issues. When he was younger, when it would have done the most good, we could not get OT because we didn't have a diagnosis. At every checkup, we told the pediatrician that he still had problems with mild muscle weakness and endurance and that we wondered if the difficult birth where his heart stopped beating, cord was wrapped around his neck and forceps were used could have caused these problems, but they never suggested getting an MRI until recently.
After recent tests ruled out other possible causes, my son's neurologist thinks all of it can be explained by something that showed up on the MRI. He said my son's cerebellum sits lower than most people's and although it is not technically a chiari, it is close, and he thinks it is close enough to cause my son's symptoms. We are waiting to see a neurosurgeon with experience with chiari to get his opinion. He doesn't think he will need surgery because the symptoms are not progressive, but he said we have to try to get the headaches stopped or the neurosurgeon will be looking at that as another chiari symptom, but he thinks they might just be regular migraines. My son gets migraines every time the barometric pressure changes so sometimes it is 4 or 5 days a week. I get them too and I have had them since I was a young teenager, but I can take Excedrin Migraine which contains aspirin and it helps but kids are not supposed to take aspirin.
I had been praying for answers. A few days before we saw the neurologist to get the results of my son's MRI and other tests, my husband and I turned on the TV and watched a Mystery Diagnosis episode about a woman whose daughter had chiari. Her daughter had frequent disabling headaches. She went to a lot of doctors and had trouble getting answers, but she didn't give up. Her daughter had surgery and is fine now. Chiari did not affect her intelligence.
I know from experience that it is hard to think when you have a migraine. I can't do math when I have a migraine and my son makes more mistakes in math when he has one. We tested ourselves on IXL math when we felt a migraine coming. The results were very different from when we did not have headaches. It affects our timing and accuracy. When I first read about dyspraxia I saw some of the symptoms that I get when I have a migraine.
My son was getting a migraine when he was tested by the neuropsychologist at age 11 during one all-day session. When I questioned the results that were worse than I expected on the performance section and asked if she thought his migraine might have caused problems with accurate testing she said she didn't think having a migraine would make any difference in test results. The testing was done through a university. The tests confirmed the high verbal IQ because his verbal ability is not as affected by the headaches. I have more trouble than he does verbally when I have a migraine.
The fact that my son is doing so well in his writing composition class and on IXL math when he is working around almost daily headaches and back pain and sensory issues, etc. make me wonder even more about IQ, especially performance IQ. Just how is this supposed to affect a person academically? Why would his IQ be lower because he has sensory and motor disabilities when it doesn't seem to affect him that much academically as long as he is given accommodations?
