A Comparison of Parent Reports, the Mental Synthesis Evaluation Checklist (MSEC) and the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC), with the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS).

This study compares two parent reports, the Mental Synthesis Evaluation Checklist (MSEC) and the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC), with the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS). The ATEC consists of four subscales, as follows: (1) expressive language, (2) sociability, (3) sensory awareness, and (4) health. The MSEC is complementary to the ATEC in measuring complex language comprehension. The parents of 143 autistic children, from 2 to 22 years of age (mean 6.7 ± 5.1 years), completed the MSEC and the ATEC questionnaires and a clinician assessed their CARS score. The CARS score correlated strongly with all parent reports, the complex language comprehension MSEC (r = 0.60, p < 0.0001), expressive language (r = 0.66, p < 0.0001), sociability (r = 0.58, p < 0.0001), sensory awareness (r = 0.71, p < 0.0001), and health (r = 0.53, p < 0.0001), as well as the total ATEC score (r = 0.75, p < 0.0001). The strongest correlation was between the CARS score and the composite of all five parent-reported scores (total ATEC + MSEC, r = 0.77, p < 0.0001). These results suggest a high fidelity of the MSEC and ATEC parent reports and especially of their composite score, total ATEC + MSEC.

Does the sympathetic block outlast sensory block: a thermographic evaluation.

A study to evaluate the duration of sympathetic and sensory block in the L2 and L5 dermatome distributions using thermography and pinprick was conducted. Twenty patients received epidural block using 2% lidocaine with epinephrine. Onset and duration of the sensory and sympathetic blocks were determined and compared statistically. There was no difference between the duration of sensory and sympathetic block over the L2 dermatome, but sympathetic block was significantly longer than sensory block in the L5 dermatome. This study demonstrates that the duration of sympathetic block can be either longer or shorter than sensory block in L2 and L5 dermatomes. This has important implications for interpretation of results of differential epidural studies in that one cannot predict the duration of sympathetic block based on duration of sensory block.