Adaptation of the Italian Version of the Mealtime Assessment Scale in Pediatric Population (MAS-p).
Laura Antonucci, Paola Carrozza, Maria Pia Taglioli and 5 others
PMID 40900342WHAT IT FOUND
The adapted Italian Mealtime Assessment Scale for children showed good reliability and consistency in a small pilot.
It helps speech-language pathologists observe safety and efficacy during meals in real-life settings, though further validation is needed before clinical use.
Key findings
01The adapted scale demonstrated good internal consistency for both swallowing safety and efficacy subscales.
02Intra-rater and inter-rater agreement were good for all items in the pilot study.
03The scale was adapted to assess swallowing safety and efficacy during meals in an ecological setting for the pediatric population.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was a small pilot with only 40 participants, which limits the generalizability of the findings. The scale has not yet been validated against a gold-standard diagnostic test for dysphagia. The sample included children with heterogeneous conditions, but the tool's performance in specific subgroups was not analyzed. The final version of the scale was modified after the pilot, so the psychometric properties reported here apply to the preliminary version.
Declared interests
The paper does not report any specific funding sources or conflicts of interest declarations.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use this scale as a validated diagnostic tool yet. The results come from a small pilot study of 40 children, and the authors state that further multicentre validation is needed before it can be considered reliable for clinical screening.
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