[Disorders of short-term memory, a necessary category in the multiaxial classification scheme?].

Problems with short-term memory have been reported in conjunction with numerous psychiatric disorders of childhood. Deficits in both visual and auditory short-term memory were found more frequently in a group of 23 children between the ages of 7 and 11 years with specific developmental speech and/or language disorders and in an unselected group of 23 children seen at the inpatient unit of a child psychiatry facility than in a control group of children of comparable age and sex without language or behavior problems. Because of the diagnostic and therapeutic relevance of visual and auditory short-term memory deficits, the authors argue for the inclusion of the disorder in the Multi-axial Classification Scheme.