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The transition to formal schooling is a critical milestone in a child’s development. For Aboriginal children, early experiences are shaped by both cultural strengths and enduring impacts of colonisation. This study explored factors influencing Aboriginal families’ transition-to-school experiences in an urban Western Australian community.
Debbie Palmer BSc BND PhD Head, Nutrition in Early Life debbie.palmer@uwa.edu.au Head, Nutrition in Early Life Areas of research expertise: Maternal
(Central) Auditory Processing Disorder ([C]APD) is an umbrella term for children who have difficulty with listening, despite normal hearing. Children with (C)APD frequently experience academic, behavioural, emotional, cognitive and social difficulties, and lack accessible, long-lasting wholistic treatments. Hence, a transdisciplinary intervention has been developed – Auditory-Cued Exercise Therapy.
To better characterise prematurity-associated lung disease, adult spirometry phenotype classifications (obstructive lung disease, preserved ratio impaired spirometry and dysanapsis) have been applied to children born preterm. It is unknown how these phenotypes track over time.
Early life nutrition is associated with child behaviour; however, the interplay with genetic vulnerability is understudied. We hypothesised that psychiatric genetic risk interacted with early nutrition to predict behavioural problems in childhood and adolescence.
Current methods for assessing the healthfulness of 24-hour movement behaviours (sleep, sedentary time, light physical activity, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity) use binary classifications that fail to capture their continuous and compositional nature. This study introduces a percentile-based scoring and visualization approach to evaluate the healthfulness of movement behaviour time-use compositions, using social-emotional development in early childhood as an example.
Severe microcephaly, or head circumference at least 3 standard deviations below the mean for age and sex, is a rare condition with diverse etiology, making diagnosis challenging. Following the 2015 to 2016 Zika virus outbreak, surveillance studies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and Ireland were conducted to monitor severe microcephaly. We describe the etiology, clinical features, and diagnostic investigations of severe microcephaly among children aged younger than 1 year.
The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development are widely used to assess early development, yet evidence for inter-rater reliability in multidisciplinary contexts remains limited. This study evaluated inter-rater reliability and agreement of the newest edition, Bayley-4, at age two years when administered by a multidisciplinary allied health team within a longitudinal cohort.
There is a paucity of longitudinal research comparing early-life mental health in rural and metropolitan communities. Living in rural areas is associated with limited access to specialist care, as well as additional stresses such as natural disasters. To address health disparities for rural communities it is critical to understand variance in predictors and outcomes for child mental health.
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is widely recognized for supporting children's development and school readiness; however, evidence from Western Australia remains limited.