Critical Review of Setback in Development in Young Children with Congenital Blindness or Visual Impairment

Critical Review of Setback in Development in Young Children with Congenital Blindness or Visual Impairment

Development in Young Children with Congenital Blindness or Visual Impairment

This academic article takes Dale and Salt’s 2008 Dale review paper on presumed developmental setback (DS) in children aged 16-27 months with blindness and visual impairment. It reflects on the paucity and complexity of extant data (and the challenges of acquiring ‘clean’ data) on the development of children who are blind or have low vision because of comorbidities, low incidence, misdiagnosis around ASD, communication barriers and group heterogeneity. The authors note the alignment of existing literature results with their own clinical experience and analyses of clinical records: cautiously finding that a range of factors appear to lead to a 25-33% risk of DS in the second year of life. The authors main recommendation is for a longitudinally designed monitoring study to better identify the causing and mitigating factors that the article outlines in its ‘discussion’ section. The article describes the author’s methodology, includes tables reflecting the findings of literature reviews and includes an extensive bibliography.

Mathijs P. J. Vervloed, Ellen C. G. van den Broek & Ans J. P. M. van Eijden

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1034912X.2019.1588231

International Journal of Disability, Development and Education

13 Mar 2019

Mathijs P. J. Vervloed, Ellen C. G. van den Broek & Ans J. P. M. van Eijden

open access

hyperlink

hyperlink

10.1080/1034912X.2019.1588231