On social media, there’s a lot of discussion about sensory issues in children with Noonan’s. Is there any link to those sensory issues and behaviour and have there been any studies done on that?
What people usually mean by sensory issues are some atypicalities or unusualness in processing sensory information of all kinds – incoming visual, auditory or touch but also sensations from inside our own bodies, what we think of as proprioceptions. Children do vary on this and it is true that as part of the Autism spectrum complex, these kinds of sensory processing problems are often intrinsic to the difficulty. They also though occur outside autism as part of particular developmental difficulties. But they’re very real and they can be associated with behavioural difficulties for sure. The assessment of these is not as advanced as for some other areas of behaviour and development in the professional literature –
there’s not as much assessment and research work on this area. But I think it’s a growing one and yes often these things are related to behavioural difficulty and managing them can have really tremendous benefits on behaviour.
