New Clinic to Treat Rare Disorder

UNC Chapel Hill this afternoon will officially mark the opening of its new Comprehensive Angelman Syndrome Clinic at the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities. Anne Wheeler is a psychologist at CIDD; she's also co-coordinator for the new clinic. She says Angelman Syndrome is a rare congenital disorder that occurs in about 1 in 15-thousand births.

Anne Wheeler: And it's associated with a whole host of lifelong challenges and disorders, autistic-like behaviors, significant intellectual and behavioral disabilities, language disorders, lack of speech for a lot of them, frequent seizures, motor imbalance probs, so it's pretty significant.

Wheeler says treatment of the disorder is integrative and complex. The clinic will bring together specialists from fields including neurology, speech therapy, genetics, and physical therapy. Wheeler says the clinic is the first of its kind in the country to provide all of these resources under one roof.