My 7 (almost 8) yo DD has ADHD. She holds herself together pretty well in school (even though she can be very hyper at home), but her main issues are focus, slowness and processing speed. I am debating having her tested. She also has a big problem with math facts/fluency and her brother who is 16 months younger has surpassed her (even though the neuropsych said that he's concerned about the younger brother's processing speed!). DS scored a 141 on perceptual reasoning but a 109 for processing speed and the neuropsych said this is a large discrepancy and it is going to cause him problems and that his understanding of concepts (math in particular) will be very high but he will probably need more time to do things like calculations, or make careless mistakes. It is possible he has ADHD as well, but if so it's not nearly as obvious as DD. I am taking him back to the neuropsych in a few weeks to do testing specific to ADHD. DD might end up scoring similar to your 9 year old (she hasn't had an IQ test yet). If we play games like Memory with her she seems completely spaced out. But when she's on her medication she does fine.
Both my kids had kind of weird deliveries. The NICU had to come in for DD because she had extreme heartrate accelerations (like over 200 beats per minutes with huge rapid spikes on the monitor--very alarming). Whenever they tried to elevate me it got worse. Not sure what the deal was. The perinatologist mentioned "benign tacycardia" to me after she was born. DS had an extremely slow heartrate every time I had a contraction and he looked purple for a couple hours after he was born. But no one acted too concerned about either one of them. DS wasn't breathing very well so they sent him to the nursery for observation. I know that preemies have a higher rate of ADHD than full-term babies, but I don't know what parts of the brain are involved.
In terms of vision, OT's can do some of that. They just gave my DS a perceptual vision test a couple weeks ago. But it looked to me like it was measuring visual spatial ability, visual memory, similar to the perceptual reasoning part of the IQ test. So your DS would probably do well. The OT is trying to get us to go to a developmental optometrist, saying she can hook him up to a computer to see how his eyes are tracking. My DS had a brain injury and skull fractures on Dec. 31st that paralyzed a cranial nerve and caused one eye to be "stuck" for several months and we're not sure if it's completely normal now or not. Since he reads so fast and fluently and his eyes appear to be tracking together, the neuro-opthamologist thinks his eyes are fine. But the OT is completely unconvinced.
