Lucy Miller, John J. Foxe Open SPDF Conference
It's lousy weather here in Beantown, but that hasn't quelled the enthusiam of practitioners and educators who came here for the 7th International Symposium of the Sensory Processing Disorder Foundation. Here in one of the main ballrooms at the Hyatt Regency downtown, more than 400 OTs, OTAs, PTs and others left standing room only as they crowded in to hear Lucy Jane Miller, PhD, OTR, give the keynote address.
Miller, creator and executive director of the foundation, has been working to get SPD recognized as an independently diagnosable disorder for the past 30 years. She and fellow keynoter John J. Foxe, PhD, of the Nathan Kline Institute at the City College of City University of New York spoke of the effort in terms of both research and policy as they outlined the issues involved in the effort.
Miller and the foundation are in the midst of trying to get sensory processing disorder listed as a diagnosis in the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V that outliines mental health and behavioral disorders. Its inclusion would put sensory integrative treatment on the map, so to speak, in terms of reimbursement and research funding.
The final application has to be filed by January 2010. Otherwise, the door closes until the next edition of the manual is published in 2025. Miller has said the foundation needs half a million dollars to finish the research it needs to do in order to make that application. A separate funding arm working on the project is the Spiral Foundation at spiralfoundation.com.
Because SPD has so many faces, Miller's team of scientists is focusing on over- and under-responsivity for inclusion in the manual. You in the clinic .may know these symptoms as sensory-defensiveness and sensory-seeking behaviors. Foxe gave an eye-opening talk on the new functional imaging techniques he and his team is using to track sensory processing in the brain. In fact, they now believe that many aspects of sensory processing disorder and other syndromes that exist on a continuum, or spectrum, may happen because parts of sensory systems that work in concert with each other but are far-flung from one another in brain cortex do not communicate well enough.
Auditory somatosensory integration involves many cross connections in the brain from the start of a process to its finish. "This kind of wiring between sensory systems covers a wide area of cortex," Foxe said. "If they don't integrate, that can create [sensory] confusion."
The SPD conference includes a research track and a strategies track for intervention. I'll write more about it later, and talk more specifically about Miller's take on DSM-V progress.