Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the applicability of the Denver Developmental Screening Test (DDST) for Korean children and to develop a Korean version reflecting the developmental characteristics of children in Seoul.

Methods: The DDST was administered to 2,140 children, aged 2 weeks to 6 years and 4 months, in Seoul between July 1985 and September 1986. Participants were recruited from the pediatric departments and counseling centers of several hospitals, excluding those with conditions affecting development. Certain test items were aligned with the Korean context. Inter-examiner reliability was evaluated based on 32 children, while validity was assessed with 30 children using standard developmental scales. The Probit method was employed for statistical analysis.

Results: Children from Seoul exhibited more rapid development than their counterparts in Denver and Tokyo across all four developmental domains: personal-social, fine motor-adaptive, language, and gross motor. Specifically, Korean children displayed earlier development for 10 items within the personal-social domain, eight within fine motor-adaptive, seven in language, and seven in the gross motor domain. This advanced development was consistent across age groups. Inter-examiner reliability averaged 97.3%, and validity tests demonstrated high concordance with established developmental scales.

Conclusion: The rapid development of Korean children may be attributed to close attention paid by parents and early exposure to educational materials. However, the potential role of genetic differences cannot be denied. The occupational distribution of the fathers in the sample did not differ significantly from that of the Seoul population; thus, these findings were applied to establish a standardized Korean DDST.

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• Halted medical education in Korea amid Nobel Prizes in deep learning and machine learning research, tribute to a leader of Ewha Womans University College of Medicine, and highlights from this issue
  Sun Huh
  The Ewha Medical Journal.2024;[Epub]     CrossRef

To observe the neurobehavior of premature infants, Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale was performed on 88 newborns, of gestational age 31 weeks to 40 weeks. The infants were devided into 5 groups according to gestational ages and means, standard deviation and correlation coefficient on 26 items of BNBAS were calculated.

High correlation between items and gestational age was observed in the dimension of social interactive process and only part of items in the state control was significantly correlated. The poorest correlation was found in the dimension of motoric interactive process.

Even though BNBAS is made for mature fullterm newborns, it can be used to evaluate the neurobehavior of premature infants with special consideration of prematurity It becomes clear that since neurobehavior of premature infants are unstable, inconsistent and generally poor in response to external stimuli, the relationship between the prematures and caretakers is likely to be less optimal than fullterms, which, in extreme case, can lead to child abuse, and which should be prevented by cooperation between the caretakers and medical personnels.

Clinical estimation of gestational age at birth has been applied to 181 newborn infants who were born at Ewha Womans University Hospital from July to September 1979. Authors used neurologic examination based on evalution of passive tone, active tone and primary reflexes in order to estimate the gestational age, 1) Correlation coefficient between gestational age calculated from last menstrual period and clinical estimation of gestational age used in this study was 0.833 and regression formula was Y = 0.741+10.27. 2) There was no stastically significant difference in correlation coefficient between S.G.A, A.G.A., and I.G.A. groups. 3) Neurologic examination is objective and reproducible for estimation of gestational age in newborn infants.