Neurodevelopmental status and follow-up in preschool children with heart disease in London, UK.

Objective: To describe neurodevelopment and follow-up services in preschool children with heart disease (HD).

Design: Secondary analysis of a prospectively collected multicentre dataset.

Setting: Three London tertiary cardiac centres.

Validation of the Brief Developmental Assessment in pre-school children with heart disease.

Unlabelled: Introduction The objective of this study was to prospectively validate the "Brief Developmental Assessment", which is a new early recognition tool for neurodevelopmental abnormalities in children with heart disease that was developed for use by cardiac teams.

Methods: This was a prospective validation study among a representative sample of 960 pre-school children with heart disease from three United Kingdom tertiary cardiac centres who were analysed grouped into five separate age bands.

Results: The "Brief Developmental Assessment" was successfully validated in the older four age bands, but not in the youngest representing infants under the age of 4 months, as pre-set validation thresholds were met - lower 95% confidence limit for the correlation coefficient above 0.