Nigerian autism

Early Detection of Autism and Mental Health Disorders in Nigerian Children before the Age of 5

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are conditions that affect brain development, impacting social, behavioral, and communication abilities. ASD includes Asperger’s Syndrome, autistic disorder, childhood disintegrated disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS). Can you please provide clarity or a brief summary of how these conditions impact brain development, social, behavior and communication abilities? A brief overview may be important for those unfamiliar with the list of disorders and syndromes you mentioned above. These disorders affect people of all ages and mostly begin in childhood. Therefore, ASD in children below the age of five is a topic of interest for many researchers. This paper is an article critique of: “Approaches to enhancing the early detection of autism spectrum disorders: a systematic review of the literature.” The research paper was written by Amy M. Daniels, Ph.D., Alycia K. Halladay, Ph.D., Andy Shih, Ph.D., Lauren M. Elder, Ph.D., and Geraldine Dawson, Ph.D., and appeared in the ‘Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.’ The paper discusses the early detection of ASD approaches in primary care and other community settings in the United States. In this study, the researchers searched peer-reviewed and gray literature from January 1990 to January 2013 concerning early detection of autism. The results showed that early detection of autism in children allows for prompt attention, thereby giving more positive results.

Introduction

The study aimed to review the literature on early detection of ASD in primary care and other community settings. The review sought to answer the following questions: "What are the approaches to enhancing early detection of autism spectrum disorders and developmental delay in community settings in the United States? How do these approaches compare with respect to populations studied, intervention components, and outcomes?” (Daniels et al., 2014). The study is a literature review; thus, the review details are not included in the introduction.

Method

The study gives a comprehensive report of peer-reviewed articles containing the keywords: autism, developmental delay, developmental disorder (condition); community, daycare, center, clinic, preschool, primary care (setting); approach, component, guideline, implement, intervention, model, plan, policy, practice, program, project, protocol, recommendation, strategy, standard (approach); and awareness, detection, diagnosis, referral, screening (outcome). The research team sought information from PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Web of Science, and Web of Knowledge. They also used gray literature such as government reports. They studied forty articles in total, from which they got thirty-five approaches that met the criteria for their review. Please provide more specifics related to the number of articles reviewed and if they are statistically signification. I see that 40 articles where reviewed, but do you have specifics related to the articles so that readers can better understand the contents. For example, did the articles focus primarily in a central geographic location. Was the overall sample size of the articles significant and diversified? Was there a common theme used in the methodology between the reviews? Here, a brief and comprehensive summary of the methods used would be helpful to the reader.

Results

The report has clarity of communication and is easy to follow. It is well-detailed, and the results are tabulated for easier understanding. The result table contains information on study and location, participants, design, setting, intervention, and outcomes. The results identify three different approaches, including awareness, routine screening, and practice improvement to enhance screening. This appears to be very broad. How were the results well-detailed? What make the results easy to understand? This section could benefit from more clarity as it relates to the results of the study. From this section it isn’t clear what the results were.

Discussion

The study shows that screening of young children for ASD was conducted during routine well-child visits to the primary care facilities. However, some studies revealed that screening was also carried out during visits to the physicians. The discussion part of this paper is well-detailed and highlights the findings which can be used in other countries, including Nigeria and other sub-Saharan countries. However, the research was conducted primarily in America for better comparability of approaches and outcomes across studies (Daniels et al., 2014). Further research can be based on the comparative effectiveness of using different screening modes as the literature in this study shows the use of one approach per study. Future research may also focus on underserved communities. This section also appears to lack specifics. Here it may be beneficial to include any relevant statistics, observations, and figures that are relevant to the overall discussion.

Conclusion

The research article “Approaches to enhancing the early detection of autism spectrum disorders: a systematic review of the literature" by Daniels, et al. (2014) is a review of literature on ASD detection. The researchers suggest that early detection of ASD gives room for prompt attention, thus promoting early treatment to arrest the health problem. They, therefore, advocate for testing through different institutions for young children, such as the well-child clinics. They encourage the involvement of government institutions in the early detection of ASD. The findings give crucial information that can be useful even in other countries, including Nigeria.

Critique

Overall the review was very succinct and easy to both understand and read. Your clearly articulated the topic and provide key elements of Autism and its early detection. However, many of the segments lacked information and specifics that would aid the reader in determining the merit of the articles and their findings. For example, the first paragraph didn’t provide details related to the research disorders, what they are, and how they impact children in Nigeria. Here, a brief summary of the problem and its overall impact will provide readers with a better sense of why they should care about Autism in Nigeria. In also provided context as to why the research is relevant.

Overall the critique should add more specifics regarding key points within each segment. You do a wonderful job of providing a broad overview, but key specifics are missing from the critique. For example, within the “Method” and “Results” sections, additional specifics would be helpful to provide context within the overall critique. Here, these specifics would relate to articles use in the studies, a summary of the observations within a subset of these articles, and some of the shortcomings of the findings of the articles. Here, noting some of the shortcomings will provide the critique with a much more unbiased approached while also showing that you conducted proper due diligence.