Abstract
Childhood disintegrative disorder (CDD) is a rare pervasive developmental disorder that involves regression after a period of at least 2 years of typical development. This case study presents data from family home movies, coded by reliable raters using an objective coding system, to examine the trajectory of development in one child with a reported regression at 48 months of age. Coding substantiated parent reports of mostly typical early development, followed by later catastrophic loss of skills across many developmental domains. Differential diagnosis of CDD and autism with regression is discussed.
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Notes
The following modifications were made to the coding system of Werner et al. (2005): (1) only gaze to faces was coded from their “gaze at people” code, (2) only pointing was coded from their “gesture/joint attention” code, and (3) their “repetitive motor with and without objects” code was expanded to include unusual visual inspection of objects.
The Mullen was administered, although it was not appropriate for Nicholas’ chronological age, because he was unable to complete the routing items of the Stanford-Binet and other intellectual tests were not appropriate for his functioning level. For this reason, Mullen standard scores could not be calculated and only age equivalents are reported
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Acknowledgments
This work was funded by NICHD U19-HD35468 (Project 2, Regression) awarded to the last author. The authors would like to express gratitude to Nicholas’ family for their generosity in sharing their lives and Nicholas’ history with us and for commenting on a draft of this manuscript. The first author was supported by a grant from the Consejeria de Educación de la Comunidad de Madrid (Education Ministry of the Community of Madrid, Spain), co-financed by the European Union, and by a research mobility grant from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid for funding his research visit to the M.I.N.D. Institute. We also want to acknowledge all the coders who worked on the project, particularly Matthew Ong and Angela Shih. In addition we are very grateful to Geraldine Dawson, Ph.D., Emily Werner, Ph.D., and Grace Baranek, Ph.D., for sharing their work and methods with us.
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Palomo, R., Thompson, M., Colombi, C. et al. A Case Study of Childhood Disintegrative Disorder Using Systematic Analysis of Family Home Movies. J Autism Dev Disord 38, 1853–1858 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-008-0579-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-008-0579-1