Doctors focus on diagnosing developmental disorders

In years gone by youngsters who fell behind in school were officially classified as “slow learners.” A less sensitive term often applied in Belize was “duncey.” But doctors and educators worldwide have learned that the roots of childhood learning problems go much deeper than simple labels. News Five’s Kendra Griffith reports.

Francisca Tzalam Ch?oc, Toledo, Nurse Administrator for Hillside Health Clinic
?They are not seen in a positive way. They are always put in a corner or isolated from the other children.?

Kendra Griffith, Reporting
This mother is describing is the plight of the children with developmental disorders, the focus of a clinic held today at the K.H.M.H.

Dr. Egbert Grinage, President, Friends of Paediatrics
?Between today and Monday we will be having these two or three developmental paediatrics seeing children with all sorts of developmental disorders like autism, attention deficit disorders and hyperactivity, other speech and language disorders, learning disorders and behavioural disorders.?

Dr. Adrian Sandler, Developmental Paediatrician
?The idea is to try to determine what the nature of the children?s problems might be and what kinds of interventions might be helpful for the kids.?

Developmental Paediatrician Adrian Sandler is one of the doctors with the International Hospital for Children in the U.S. state of Virginia. Sandler says there is still a lot that is not known about what causes many of these disorders.

Dr. Adrian Sandler
?I think that genetic factors probably account for almost ninety percent of what we call autism. So I think as more research is being done we?re gonna get a clearer idea of possible genes that are involved, but at this point I think the honest answer is to say we don?t know exactly, but it does appear to be largely a genetic condition.?

According to President of Friends of Paediatrics, Dr. Egbert Grinage, those conditions are more prevalent than people might think.

Egbert Grinage
?Developmental disorders as a whole were recently reviewed briefly by one of our specialists. It showed that at the special education unit there are over two thousand cases diagnosed between 1993 and 1997 alone and a bunch of them fell into a wastebasket called slow learners. In the U.S. and North America it is estimated that between twelve to seventeen percent of the paediatric population has some sort of developmental disorder, so it?s a very important issue.?

Kendra Griffith
?How is someone diagnosed as being autistic??

Dr. Adrian Sandler
?Through a process of evaluations such as we?re doing in the clinics today. That may include taking a careful history, gathering information from the parents about the child?s development over time, doing some observations of the child in play and then also engaging the child in some more formal testing in order to assess whether or not the child is showing some of the core manifestations of the condition.?

Egbert Grinage
?They are gonna see what their intelligence quotient is, they are going to see whether their actual chronologic age matches up with their mental age and then they are going to try to put them into some group.?

But the clinic is not only for children.

Egbert Grinage
?One of the big goals that we have as part of Friends of Paediatrics is to try to help all people who see children particularly from an early age when the child is first developing his or her milestone to try and help parents see the warning signals, so that they can go for help. Because as I said before, early recognition leads to a better outcome. Here today the parents are being taught how to manage their child … teachers are being taught how to detect a child and manage a child in the classroom.?

One of those parents is Francisca Tzalam Ch?oc, whose son was diagnosed with an attention disorder at the age of two.

Francisc Tzalam Ch?oc
?From my background as a health professional I knew that something was wrong with my child. He was delayed in all his development I would say. He took long to talk, when he started preschool he couldn?t talk any at all, so I knew something was wrong with him. I came up to see a private doctor, Dr. Grinage, who was so good. He took us right over to special ed, they did an assessment of him and that was the first time my son was diagnosed.?

Ch?oc, a nurse administrator, is also a member of the newly-formed Special Needs Toledo Association. The group brought five kids to the clinic, three of whom are suspected of being autistic.

Francisc Tzalam Ch?oc
?It is said that Toledo has the highest rate of everything and special needs is one of them. Not a lot is being done in Toledo and so we the parents decided to get together and form this association to see how we can help our children.?

Today?s clinic forms part of activities the country?s first ever Paediatric Development Symposium to be held this Saturday and Sunday. Over four hundred participants are expected to attend the weekend?s lectures and workshops being facilitated by the visiting doctors.

Egbert Grinage
?These specialists are paediatricians who are trained in the normal development of children both from a moral and mental standpoint. They will help doctors, nurses, teachers and other health professionals in Belize to help us to diagnose what exactly is it that is causing some of these children to behave the way they are and to be showing delays, probably in their speech and language, and inability or decreased ability to learn at school.?

Kendra Griffith reporting for News Five.

The symposium on Saturday and Sunday will take place at the Princess Hotel.