Adaptation and validation of two autism-related measures of skills and quality of life in Ethiopia.
Anton Borissov, Ioannis Bakolis, Bethlehem Tekola and 7 others
PMID 34875883WHAT IT FOUND
The Amharic versions of the ATEC and PedsQL Family Impact Module reliably distinguish children with neurodevelopmental disorders from those with physical health conditions.
They are suitable for monitoring change in low-resource settings, though they do not yet track clinical severity.
Key findings
01The adapted questionnaires demonstrated mostly good internal consistency and test-retest reliability in both groups.
02The ATEC scores were significantly higher for children with neurodevelopmental disorders than for controls, with large effect sizes.
03Correlations between questionnaire scores and clinician-rated severity of autism and intellectual disability were weak and non-significant.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Convergent validity against clinical severity was not established, possibly due to the lack of specialist child psychiatrists and the limited nuance of the severity ratings used. The study did not evaluate sensitivity to change, so it is unknown how well these tools detect improvement after an intervention. The sample was restricted to urban, help-seeking families in Addis Ababa, limiting generalisability to rural or less severe cases. The retest sample was small (32 participants), which limits confidence in the stability estimates for some subscales.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The work was funded by UK government bodies (MRC, DFID, Wellcome Trust, NIHR) and King’s College London.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use the total scores to judge clinical severity or to determine if a child needs more intensive care. The tools successfully distinguish children with neurodevelopmental disorders from those with physical health conditions, but they did not correlate with clinician-rated severity of autism or intellectual disability in this study.