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Diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorders: when and how? An area-based study about health care providers
Silvia Manea, Laura Vison¨¤ Dalla Pozza, Monica Mazzucato, Oliviana Gelasio, Paola Facchin
Veneto Region, Italy
Author Affiliations: Veneto Region Child & Mother Health Observatory, Epidemiology and Community Medicine Unit, Department of Pediatrics, Padua University (Manea S, Vison¨¤ Dalla Pozza L, Mazzucato M, Gelasio O, Facchin P)
Corresponding Author: Silvia Manea, MD, PhD, Veneto Region Child & Mother Health Observatory, Epidemiology and Community Medicine Unit, Department of Pediatrics, Padua University, Via Pietro Don¨¤ 11, 35129, Padua, Italy (Tel: +39 049 8215700; Fax: +39 049 8215701; Email: manea@pediatria.unipd.it)
doi: 10.1007/s12519-014-0533-6
Background: Pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs) can be very difficult to diagnose in children and to communicate such a diagnosis to their parents. Families of children with PDD learn of their child's diagnosis long after the first symptoms are noted in the child's behavior.
Methods: An area-based survey was conducted to assess all social and health care providers taking care of patients with PDDs in the Veneto Region (North-East Italy).
Results: Only 28% of health care providers arrived at a definite diagnosis when the child was in his/her first year of age, 51% when the child was 2-3 years old and 21% from age of 4 years and up. On average, the latency between the time of the diagnosis and its communication to the family was 6.9 months. However, a number of families did not ever have a diagnosis communicated to them. Sometimes, 68% of the providers did not communicate a PDDs diagnosis to patient's families, and 4% of them quite commonly.
Conclusion: The well-known delay in making a diagnosis of PDDs has two distinct components: one relating to the difficulty of confirming a diagnosis of PDDs, the other, hitherto unrecognized, relating to the family being notified.
World J Pediatr 2015;11(1):48-53
Key words: autism, pervasive development disorders;
classification system;
communication;
diagnosis
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