| The aim of this project is to develop a sensitive, reliable and valid method to detect developmental motor disorders such as Cerebral Palsy (CP) and Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) in infancy. The Infant Motor Profile (IMP) is a recently developed video-based instrument which assesses variability of motor behaviour and the ability to select motor strategies in infancy. Spontaneous motor behaviour is evaluated in a qualitative way. To determine the intra- and interscorer agreement and the validity of the IMP two groups of infants are evaluated: healthy infants who were born at term and preterm infants with a gestational age below 32 weeks. In general, a group of preterm infants is a suitable group to validate an instrument, because the developmental outcome of preterm infants is very heterogeneous. 25 full-term infants are followed longitudinally (9 video-recordings at the age of 3,4,5,6,8,10,12,15 and 18 months) and 150 full-term infants are filmed once at 4, 6, 10, 12 and 18 months. All preterm infants with a gestational age below 32 weeks born in the UMCG in 2004 are evaluated five times at the corrected ages of 4,6,10,12 and 18 months. Every session consists of a standardised video-recording for the IMP and the Alberta Infant Motor Scale (AIMS, Piper & Darrah, 1994) and a neurological examination according to Touwen (Touwen, 1976). The concurrent validity of the IMP and the AIMS and the IMP and the neurological examination according to Touwen is determined. Also the predictive validity of the IMP at ages 3 to 15 months for the neurological outcome at 18 months is determined. The neurological examination according to Touwen at the age of 18 months is used as the golden standard, because of the limited period of this present project. Questions that will be answered/ subjects that will be covered in this project are: * The intra- and interscorer reliability of the IMP. * How do IMP-scores develop from 3 to 18 months of age for a group of healthy infants? * How is the concurrent validity of the IMP-score and the a) AIMS and b) the neurological examination according to Touwen (performed at the same ages)? * How is the predictive validity of the IMP during the first year of age for the neuromotor condition of the child at the (corrected) age of 18 months? |
