Teacher-Reported Prevalence of FASD in Kindergarten in Canada: Association with Child Development and Problems at Home.

The FASD diagnoses were teacher-reported and were not confirmed by checking existing health records, so some children may have been missed or misclassified. The study did not compare children with FASD with children who had no neurodevelopmental disorder, so the results do not show whether FASD scores were typical. The comparison group was a mixed set of other neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder, global delay, Down syndrome, intellectual delay, Rett's disorder, and learning disorders, which may not be a single comparable group. Several provinces and territories had too few children with FASD to analyse separately, so provincial patterns are less reliable than the national pattern. In some jurisdictions, very small numbers of children in the FASD groups made home-problem results difficult to interpret. New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nunavut were excluded because the teacher checklist was not collected there during the study period. The home-problems item was introduced in 2010 and relied on teacher information from parents, school records, or classroom observation, not a standardised assessment of home adversity.

Do not read the higher developmental scores as evidence that children with FASD have no communication, learning, or classroom-function problems. The comparison group was children with other neurodevelopmental disorders, not children with no disorders, and the diagnoses and abilities were teacher-reported without confirmation from health records.