Assessment of Neurodevelopmental Impairments among 0-2 Years Old Children Attending a Tertiary Care Hospital by Development Screening Questionnaire

Background: Pediatric neurodevelopmental disorders have a large burden on the health care system all over the world particularly in developing countries. Due to the constraints of the appropriate diagnostic tools many of these children report late and identification in appropriate time is not possible. These missed opportunities thus increase the number of children with disability. Therefore simple measures are needed to determine neurodevelopmental impairment (NDI) at an early age where professional expertise is sparse.

Objective: To determine the proportion of children having NDIs in a tertiary care hospital by using Development Screening Questionnaire (DSQ); and to estimate the specific types of NDIs within the study population.

Methods: It was a cross sectional observational study held in Department of Pediatric Neurology, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU), Dhaka, Bangladesh from January 2018 to December 2018. Children aged 0-2 years who were attending Pediatric Neurology out patient department were included in the study. Screening of all children in the sample was done by DSQ for NDIs.

Results: Among the study subjects, 7.26% children were found to have DSQ positive for NDIs. Cognition (64.71%) and speech (64.71%) were the mostly affected domain. Detection of NDIs by DSQ in other domains were: gross motor (35.29%), fine motor (17.65%), hearing (29.41%), vision (25.53%), behavior (5.89%) and socialization (0.0%).

Conclusion: In this study group, the frequency of NDIs was 7.26%. In certain developmental domain (i.e. cognition, speech, gross motor, hearing) NDIs were detected more in this small scale study by using DSQ.