Knowledge about diagnostic features and comorbidities of childhood autism among doctors in a tertiary care hospital

Abstract

Introduction: Epidemiological surveys indicate that the prevalence of autism is rising worldwide. A study in Sri Lanka has shown 1 in 93 children to be affected. Early diagnosis is vital as early intensive behavioural interventions improve outcome in autism. It has been shown that the level of physicians' knowledge of autism influences the average age of diagnosis and provision of further information to caregivers. Objectives:To assess the knowledge of diagnostic features and comorbidities of childhood autism among doctors in a tertiary care hospital and to identify the factors affecting it.Method: A descriptive study was conducted on 176 doctors at Colombo South Teaching Hospital, using the Knowledge about Childhood Autism among Health Workers Questionnaire. Data was collected by authors and analyzed using SPSS version 21. Ethical approval was obtained from the ethical review committee of the Lady Ridgeway Hospital.Results: Majority (61.9%) considered themselves incompetent in identifying autism. Knowledge was highest regarding symptoms of impaired social interactions (75.81%) and lowest for restricted repetitive interests/behaviours (60.79%), with a significant difference between medical officers and postgraduate trainees (p=0.045). ___________________________________________

Assessing the level of knowledge of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) among medical consultants

“…The second finding of this study was that years of practice as consultants were discovered to be non-significantly correlating with ASD knowledge among consultants. This is consistent with the findings of Rohanachandra et al (2017) study which discovered that ASD knowledge did not differ significantly with years of experience. However, this study found ASD knowledge among medical consultants to be significantly correlating with years of practice for consultants of five years and more for domain one in the KCAHW.…”

“…Low level among medical staff is an issue that need to be considered in future studies as those people play an essential role in the early detection and diagnosis of ASD. Most studies indicated a significant relationship between ASD knowledge and years of experience for medical staff (Hayat et al, 2019;Helmy, 2017;Hend, 2017;Igwe et al, 2010;Rohanachandra et al, 2017;Samar et al, 2018) and with their subspecialty (Eseigbe et al, 2015;Hayat et al, 2019). None of these studies have examined the reasons behind this low level of knowledge, which is important to be able to find better solutions and suggestions for improvement within the medical curriculum.…”

“…The questionnaires used in this study were a general demographics questionnaire to collect information about the participants and the KCAHW questionnaire which is a validated and reliable tool for assessing knowledge of health workers about ASD (Bakare et al, 2008). It has been utilized in many countries and in different languages around the world (Igwe et al, 2010;Ozdemir et al, 2020;Rohanachandra et al, 2017).This study used the original English version as the sample was medical consultants who master English language. KCAHW is a self-administered questionnaire that consist of 19 items and each of the items has three options to select from with only one of these three options being correct.…”

Knowledge, attitudes, and practices of primary health care physicians, junior doctors, and medical college students towards autism in Duhok, Iraq

“…24 The majority of medical doctors in Siri Lanka (61.9%) regarded themselves as incapable of diagnosing autism. 25 Although most of the respondents in our study knew the age of diagnosis of autism which is at three years, physicians in other countries have different percentages of correct answers. 26 In Pakistan, only 56.2% of them recognized that the onset of symptoms of autism should be before 36 months.…”

Machine Learning Based Automated Speech Dialog Analysis Of Autistic Children

“…Currently, there are no autism screening tools that are widely used in Sri Lanka among pediatricians that would assist with the identification process [5]. A study done in a tertiary children hospital revealed that 34% of the doctors were unaware of the main presenting symptoms as speech delay and a further 39% failed to recognize the comorbidities in ASD [7].…”