Developmental Delay Flashcards
What is Developmental Delay?
Considerable delay in the physical or mental development of a child compared with their peers
What is Global developmental delay?
Delay in development in all areas
What is Developmental regression?
Loss of an acquired function or failure to progress after a period of relatively normal development
What is Failure to thrive (faltering weight)?
Insufficient weight gain, or inappropriate weight loss
What is early developmental impairment?
- Developmental skills fall ≥ 2 SD below the population mean in ≥ 2 developmental domains.
- Shown in children under 5 years.
- Occurs in approx 1 – 3 % of the population
What are factors of Early Developmental Impairment?
- Gross/fine motor skills
- Speech/language
- Cognition
- Social/personal
- Activities of daily living
Why do we investigate developmental delay?
- Explanation to parents why child is ‘different’
- Prognostic information
- Set realistic goals
- Access to educational support
- Other support for family
- End the ‘diagnostic odyssey’
- Treatment
- Management of secondary disabilities
- Future pregnancies and the wider family
What is involved in the assessment of a child with developmental delay?
- History
- Developmental assessment
- Physical examination
- Differential diagnosis
- Laboratory investigations
- Routine biochemistry
- Specialist metabolic tests
- Genetics
What is involved in the history in the assessment of a child with developmetal delay?
Most important investigation. Keep a broad view and open mind
- Family history (parents, siblings, grandparents)
- Consanguinity
- Illnesses, early death
- Any attending a special school
- Pregnancy and delivery. If child has problems from birth, are they:
- genetic
- in utero insult
- perinatal events?
- Family environment
- Resources accessible to family
What is involved in the physical examination of a child with developmental delay?
- Height, weight, head circumference using percentile charts
- Birth marks
- Dysmorphic features
- Neurological assessment
- Eyes
- Hearing
- Speech
What are features that point to an inherited metabolic disrder causing developmental delay?
- Parental consanguinity
- Family history of unexplained illness, infant death or late miscarriage
- Symptom-free interval
- Slowing down of skill acquisition
- Loss of skills
- Coarse facial features – metabolic disorder
- Organomegally
What are considerations made when planning tests for developmental delays?
- Cost of test
- Diagnostic yield
- Diagnosis of treatable disorders
- Review the evidence for the test
- Protocol based on clinical findings – differs for each child
- Turnaround time
What are features of CGH microarray in laboratory investigations?
- It is the laboratory test with greatest diagnostic yield in investigation of developmental delay
- Done in Median age 4 years
- Cytogenetic technique which identifies copy number variations. It identifies large deletions or duplications of DNA such as changes of 5 – 10 megabases.
- The genomic DNA from two individuals compared
- Analysed sample in sex-matched pairs
What are indications for CGH microaaray?
- Developmental delay
- Neurodisability
- Congenital abnormalities
- Dysmorphism
What are symptoms of Fragile X syndrome?
- Delayed development, mild intellectual disability, speech and language delay
- Increased CGG triplet repeats on FMR1 gene on X chromosome (> 200, normal 5 – 40)
- May be family history - 1 in 4000 M, 1 in 8000 F
- Specific genetic test is CGH Microarray