Global and communicative development skills in preschool children with cleft lip and palate

摘要

Importance:Cleft lip and palate(CLP)is globally among the most common childhood malformations.This disorder impacts childhood development,including speech and language,and affects children worldwide.Objective:To analyze child development skills(adaptive fine motor,gross motor,personal-social,and language)in preschool children with isolated CLP compared with children without this malformation.Methods:The participants included an experimental group of 27 children with isolated CLP and a comparison group of 27 children without CLP aged between 48 and 59 months.The groups were evaluated using two instruments:the Denver Developmental Screening Test II(DDST-II)and the Avaliapao do Desenvolvimento da Linguagem(ADL-Language Development Assessment).Data were analyzed by descriptive and inductive analyses,using the Student’s Mest and the Mann-Whitney test,at a significance level of P<0.05.Results:All children in the comparison group performed within normal standards for their age range in the DDST-II and the ADL.The worst performance in the experimental group was observed in language skills,followed,in declining order,by adaptive fine motor,personal-social,and gross motor as measured by the DDST-II.Children with isolated CLP also performed poorly in receptive,expressive,and global language in the ADL.No statistically significant differences were observed in the experimental group’s scores for the ADL and the DDST-II.Interpretation:Developmental skill levels were below expectations for children of this age with isolated CLP.