Four key questions that identify severe disability.

Background: Six hundred and four surviving children aged 2 years, who had been entered into a neonatal trial of fresh frozen plasma on the incidence of intraventricular haemorrhage, were grouped into four categories of disability based on a review by a full paediatric assessment. A 29 item questionnaire completed by the children's health visitors was used to group the children into the same categories.

Aims: To explore whether severe disability could be identified by using only a few of the 29 questions.

Method: The sensitivity and specificity of individual questions were used first to find the subset of questions that best identified children with severe disability. The efficacy of the four most useful questions was tested in a separate cohort of 105 children for whom health visitors had completed questionnaires at the age of 2 years, and who had similarly been assessed by a paediatrician.

Results: In the original trial cohort, the four questions correctly identified 56 of the 61 children with the most severe disabilities as assessed by the paediatrician, and seven children were falsely identified as being severely disabled. In the second cohort, the four questions correctly identified six of the seven children classified as severely disabled by the paediatrician, with no false positives.

Conclusion: If four such questions were included in routine child information systems at age 2 years, it might be possible to obtain useful data on the prevalence of severe disability in children.