Developmental coordination disorder

For the last 100 years, poor motor coordination in children has been recognized as a developmental problem.(1) As early as 1937, these children were classified as "clumsy."' Since then, other terms such as "motorically awkward," "motor impaired," and "physically awkward" have been used to describe these children, and the terms "developmental apraxia" and "perceptual motor difficulties" have been used to characterize this developmental problem.(2,3) Since the 1994 International Consensus Conference on Children and Clumsiness, the term "developmental coordination disorder" (DCD) has been used to describe the condition of children with motor incoordination.(1,4) The purpose of this article is to provide the following information about DCD: (1) definition, (2) prevalence, (3) etiology, (4) discussion regarding the difficulties in classifying these children, (5) common characteristics, (6) long-term prognosis, and (7) brief review of treatment approaches.