OBJECTIVE: To investigate the understanding of speech sound disorder (SSD) among child health practitioners.
METHODS: The clinical data of 506 children with an initial diagnosis of SSD from January 2017 to May 2019 were retrospectively analyzed.
RESULTS: Of the 506 SSD children, 90.5% had a description of developmental behavior in their medical records; 97.6% received a developmental-behavioral evaluation, mostly intellectual and developmental screening tests, which were given to 95.8% (485/506) of the total children. A total of 116 (22.9%) children also had neurodevelopmental disorders, commonly presenting with language disorder, global developmental delay, and intellectual disability; however, 53 (45.7%) of the 116 children had no history records of such abnormal developmental behavior. The incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders was significantly higher in the children with abnormal hearing reported by their families than in the children with normal hearing reported by their families (P<0.001). The children with abnormal response to sound stimulation on physical examination had significantly more frequent neurodevelopmental disorders than those with normal response to sound stimulation (P<0.05). Among the 506 children with SSD, hearing condition was ignored in 33.2% in history records, and in 31.2% on physical examination. Ninety-two children (18.2%) completed the diagnostic hearing test, 12% (11/92) of whom were diagnosed with hearing loss. Of the 11 children with hearing loss, three had passed a hearing screening, three had family-reported normal hearing, and seven had normal response to sound stimulation on physical examination.
CONCLUSIONS: SSD is frequently comorbid with neurodevelopmental disorders in children. Children's communication performance is a key to the diagnosis of neurodevelop-mental disorders. It's necessary to the diagnosis of SSD to perform a medical history collection about neuropsychological development and a developmental-behavior evaluation. There is a high proportion of children with SSD receiving the developmental-behavioral evaluation, suggesting that child health practitioners pay close attention to the neuropsychological development of SSD children, but mostly, the evaluation merely involves intellectual developmental screening tests. The detection rate of hearing loss in children with SSD is high. However, child health practitioners underestimate this problem, and have an insufficient understanding of the importance of the diagnostic hearing test. The diagnostic hearing test should be the preferred recommendation for assessing hearing ability rather than past hearing screening results or children's response to sound stimulation in life scenes.
