KOCHI: In a significant step towards bringing down physical and mental disabilities in the country, the International Clinical Epidemiology Network (INCLEN), along with the Child Development Centre (CDC), Medical College, Thiruvananthapuram, has come up with a set of tools for the early diagnosis of five neuro-developmental disorders (NDDs) in children. The tools will be available free of cost and are developed in such a way that even community health workers will be able to use them to diagnose the diseases in children. The tools have been developed to detect autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, attention deficit disorders and for otoacoustic emission (OAE) testing. “As of now there are no freely available tools to detect these disorders in India. The use of foreign tools has been quite expensive. As a result, in the majority of cases, these ailments go undetected until the disabilities become acute,” said Narendra Arora, executive director, INCLEN, India. Apart from the five tools that are developed, five other existing tools for NDDs including, those for vision, mental retardation, learning disability, speech and social quotient have been standardised and developed for Indian needs. The system is based on a set of questions on a particular child. Based on the answers a health worker or a doctor will be able to detect the disease.To meet the requirements in various parts of the country, the tools have been developed in seven languages including Malayalam, Urdu, Hindi, Odia, Tamil, Khasi and Gharo. “The tools can be used to screen children with 10 different types of neuro-developmental disorders. Once a disorder is detected, the parents or a community health worker can send the child to a doctor for further investigation and treatment. If a child is detected with an NDD before one year of age and if the treatment could be started from then on, then the associated disabilities could be reduced by as much as 40 per cent. Even in the case of NDDs like autism, where detection is possible only after one and a half years, significant improvement can be made. Apart from this, the project can also be used to get the estimate of the children in the country who are suffering from these diseases,” said M K C Nair, the principal investigating officer of the project and the director of the Child Development Centre. The project being funded by several organisations including the National Trust, began in 2005. After the final validation of the 50,000 samples collected from various parts of the country through community-based house-to-house surveys, the tools will be available in the public domain by July.
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