A Study of Developmental Milestones’ Status and its Risk Factors in Infants at Tehran, Capital of Iran
Parichehr Tootoonchi.
Background: In the first year of age an infant acquires lots of skills in all developmental domains such as gross motor, fine motor-adaptive, language and personal- social. Because at early ages the children’s developmental problems are too subtle to diagnose easily by health workers or clinicians, some screening tools have been developed to detect potential problems. One of these screening tools is Denver developmental screening test (DDST). The objective of this study was to determine the developmental milestones’ status and its risk factors in infants living in Tehran, capital of Iran by DDST.
Methods: In a cross-sectional study, we studied below 1 year old infants attended to the 10 health centers throughout the Tehran, capital of Iran. The health centers selected randomly and the infants selected conveniently. From each center about 100 infants included, and their characteristics and risk factors were collected by interviewing the mothers by a structured questionnaire. Then, data about the developmental milestones’ condition gathered by observing the infant according to a DDST standard catalog by trained personnel. Afterwards, the normal and abnormal (including delay) condition in the infant determined.
Findings: Of 1004 infants included in the study, overall, delay was shown in 209 infants (20.8%). In detail and separately, there were delay in 101 infants (10%) in doing gross motor, 36 infants (3.6%) in doing fine motor-adaptive, 24 infants (2.4%) in language and 48 infants (4.8%) in doing personal-social developmental milestones. As expected, there was significant statistical relationship between delay in doing gross motor, fine motoradaptive, language or personal-social milestones with birth weight or gestational age.
Conclusion: Our findings are similar to other studies’, however, directing prospecting studies in order to repeating DDST in the studied infants one more time for confirming the observing delay is highly recommended.
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