The agreement between two screening tests for language evaluation in premature and low weight children

Abstract

Objectives: to evaluate the agreement of the results in two screening tests on children´s development -Denver II and Early Language Milestone Scale (ELM) aged two to three years old, born prematurely and with low weight.Methods: two screening instruments: Denver II and ELM were applied for the development in an observational cross-sectional descriptive study. The agreement between Denver II Test and its language sector and ELM were assessed by Kappa coefficient.Results: 77 children evaluated, 36.3% had an overall loss of the development performed by Denver II and 32.5% loss of the language by ELM. The agreement between the results of Denver II test considering all sectors versus ELM showed Kappa coefficient of 0.856 (p<0.001) and considering only the language sector of Denver II versus ELM, the Kappa coefficient was 0.886 (p<0.001).Conclusions: the developmental impairment observed in the children studied by assessing Denver II and through its language sector showed agreement with changes in the language abilities observed in ELM.

Avaliação do desenvolvimento motor infantil em crianças de alto risco

“…However, when the link between the sex of the children studied and child development is assessed, an association was not found, thus disagreeing with other findings in the literature, for example, a research that demonstrated that girls achieved performance better in three of the areas surveyed (social personnel, fine motor and language) and only in one of the areas (large motor) there was no statistically significant difference between females and males. 2 It can be seen, with regard to the type of delivery, in this study, that there was no significant statistical association, a fact that is in disagreement with the literature, since several authors pointed out that cesarean delivery is a risk factor for child development, as a study, 11 that evaluated 77 children aged two to three years, premature and of low weight, in the city of Cuiabá (MT), noting that children who were born by cesarean delivery had a 44.6% change in the Denver II test, with a predominance in language area.…”

New trends in instruments for child development screening in Brazil: a systematic review

“…It is important to highlight that six studies included only children under two years of age [11][12][13][14][15][16] . For the most part, the target populations were children with normal development 11,12,15,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] or children at-risk for delays 14,16,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] . Two studies included children with confirmed disability diagnoses, such as cerebral palsy 37 and microcephaly 13 .…”

“…Denver II (21,24,29). many of those studies used the screening tests according to their respective purposes, such as verifying the incidence of suspicion of development delays and searching for relationships between risk factors and developmental outcomes in the infant population.…”

“…Among the screening tests adopted in the reviewed papers, the Denver Test II was the one most frequently used in 12 studies. Although there is no authorized adaptation or validation of this test for use with a Brazilian population, two researchers used it as a gold-standard in the validation of an assessment measure 21,29 . This choice was made based on the popularity of the Denver II Test, as well as the scarcity of validated screening tests for use with Brazilian children.…”