Title
Child development with the D-score
Author
Eekhout, I.
van Buuren, S.
Publication year
2022
Abstract
Session Keynote. Healthy growth and development in young children are essential for their future well-being. Professionals and parents consider it necessary to monitor children’s development. While we can track the child’s physical growth by growth charts to identify children with signs of potential delay, there are no charts for monitoring child development. To create such charts, we need to have a unit of development, similar to units like meters or kilograms. The D-Score translates the results of different developmental milestones into a single unit for age 0-4 [1]. The D-score for child development is comparable with the unit meter for height and kg for weight. The D-score was initially developed to unify the milestones of the Dutch Developmental Instrument into a single score. Recent advances have expanded the use of the D-score by including milestones from over 20 international tools that assess early child development [2]. The expansion of the D-score allows the comparison of development of children, or groups of children, who were measured with these different tools. The D-score will be an important outcome measure in intervention studies. As such, the D-score is used in global projects by the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The D-score is a global measure of child development, that represents multiple domains (e.g. fine and gross motor-activity, and communication) over the entire range of the scale and correlates to concurrent measures. The D-score depicts a development trajectory increasing with age similar to growth curves for height and weight. As a result, early development can be easily monitored across time and compared with peers which will also allow the detection of developmental delay. The D-score is an easily interpretable metric that can represent change and is comparable across cultures and contexts.
Subject
Health
D-score
Growth
Children
Development
Child development
Milestones
Measurement
Monitoring
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http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2eb25b8d-15b9-44a1-9122-79fd281ac8f7
TNO identifier
977146
Publisher
Conventus Credo, Zagreb
Source
21st EUSUHM (European Union for School and University Health and Medicine) Congress School and Adolescent Health Priorities - Rethinking, Redefining, Responding, 29th Sept-2nd Oct 2022, Split, Coratia, 29
Document type
public lecture