Hoarding Behaviors in Children With Learning Disabilities

Abstract

Our objective was to describe the prevalence, comorbidity, and neuropsychological profiles of children with hoarding and learning disabilities. From 61 children with learning disabilities, 16.4% exhibited hoarding as a major clinical issue. Although children with learning disabilities and hoarding displayed greater rates of obsessive-compulsive disorder (30%) as compared to those with learning disabilities without hoarding (5.9%), the majority of patients belonging to the former group did not display obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis. When learning disability patients with hoarding were compared to age-, sex-, and IQ-matched learning disability subjects without hoarding, hoarders exhibited a slower learning curve on word list-learning task. In conclusion, salient hoarding behaviors were found to be relatively common in a sample of children with learning disabilities and not necessarily associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, supporting its nosological independence. It is unclear whether underlying cognitive features may play a major role in the development of hoarding behaviors in children with learning disabilities.