119 Teacher-reported prevalence of FASD in kindergarten and its associations with home problems and early intervention in 2010-2020
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) arise in childhood and involve impairments in intellectual, social, motor, or language abilities. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is a NDD caused by prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE), and its effects are often compounded by the presence of home problems and poverty. Although diagnosis is associated with access to support, obtaining an early diagnosis of FASD is difficult due to poor diagnostic capacity and stigma. The Canadian FASD diagnostic guidelines were updated in 2016 to include an ‘at-risk’ designation to prioritize service provision and follow-up for children with PAE. Objectives It is unknown whether the prevalence of FASD in kindergarten increased after these updates. We aimed to determine the prevalence of teacher-reported FASD in kindergarten after 2016, as well as the association of FASD with home problems and early intervention compared to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other NDDs. Design/Methods From 2010 to 2020, kindergarten teachers across Canada reported health diagnoses, home problems, and early intervention for 996,778 students using the Early Development Instrument. The teacher-reported prevalence of the three diagnoses before and after 2016 were compared using a Wald z test of independent proportions and the associations with home problems and early intervention were examined using logistic regression. Results The prevalence of teacher-reported FASD in kindergarten decreased from 0.11% to 0.07% after 2016 (p<.001) whereas the prevalence of teacher-reported ASD increased from 1.0% to 1.2% during this period (p<.001). Compared to children with ASD, children with FASD had 4.66 times greater odds (CI: 3.59, 6.04, p<.001) and children with another NDD had 1.72 times greater odds (CI: 1.61, 2.00, p<.001) of experiencing home problems. Children with FASD and other NDDs were also 48% (CI: 0.40, 0.62, p<.001), and 64% (CI: 0.33, 0.39, p<.001) less likely, respectively, to have received early intervention compared to their peers with ASD. Thus, the teacher-reported prevalence of FASD in kindergarten did not increase after updates to the Canadian FASD diagnostic guidelines, even though it increased for ASD. Conclusion Furthermore, the higher likelihood for children with FASD of experiencing home problems, and their lower likelihood of having received an early intervention, as reported by their teacher, highlight the need for family-centered supports and for identifying these children at an earlier age so they can access services sooner, both of which could help encourage healthy development for children with FASD and other NDDs. This study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".