Designing and conducting an epidemiological study in children with severe generalized cerebral palsy is associated with characteristic difficulties. Even though we have considerable experience with research through care organisations [
52], the initiation of this first study in children lead to specific, not always anticipated, problems, which caused a substantial delay. In the present study several obstacles needed to be overcome, which will most likely be encountered in future studies as well. This started with the design of a realistic, ethically acceptable study, including the choice of feasible diagnostic assessment methods and was followed by the recruitment of a representative cohort. In addition, one should bear in mind that on-site measurements and therewith inclusion through care centres (specialized day-care centres and residential facilities) and specialized schools can jeopardise timely inclusion due to potential lengthy procedures.
Dealing with encountered obstacles
Designing the study was complicated by ethical issues, which were resolved by a limited concession in the study design. In standard (nested) case-control studies, hypothesized risk factors are determined at baseline. In the present study, indeed, we will determine respiratory function, constipation and dysphagia at the start of the study, as risk factors. However, gastro-oesophageal reflux and malnutrition are disorders that are likely to cause a considerable loss of quality of life, apart from their possible effects on pneumonias, and both can easily be treated. Therefore, it was considered ethically unacceptable to determine the presence of these conditions at the start of the follow-up and then postponing treatment until the study would be finished. For that reason, we decided to perform the diagnostic tests for these conditions at the end of the follow-up period. This theoretically reduces the power of the analysis, but this reduction is relative since both conditions have a chronic character. We consider this design ethically acceptable, even though we purposely will not assess gastro-oesophageal reflux and nutritional state at baseline, because we will not interfere with common medical practice. Therefore, medical diagnosing and treatment of these disorders will not be hampered.
To conduct this study, a group of children with recurrent pneumonias needed to be identified prospectively. It would make sense to do this retrospectively. However, a previously conducted pilot study indicated that medical records, even when combined with interviews of paediatricians and intellectual disability physicians, provided incomplete and therefore unreliable information on pneumonias in these children [
33].
Getting informed consent of the carers of all eligible children in a geographical area within a reasonable time span was difficult. Firstly, there was no clear registration of the centres that provide care for this specific population in the Netherlands, which resulted in a search amongst a range of organisations. Secondly, centres all had their own procedure to decide on cooperation with a study, often including management, medical staff, other personnel, parent boards and ethics committees. In some centres no standard procedure existed, since they had never been asked to participate in a study before. Thirdly, the national ethics committee considered this study as a multi-centre study and required a consent-form from each centre in advance of their final approval. Although this procedure works well in studies with 2 or 3 participating hospitals, for the present study it meant that 56 centres needed to decide on participation in advance. The resulting delay was a new and unsatisfying experience for the national ethics committee as well. Fourthly, privacy regulations lead to great dependence on willingness and organizational skills of the participating centres. The selection of eligible children had to be done by care centre personnel, and information brochures were sent while researchers were blinded for names and addresses. Despite these encountered difficulties, we have approached a representative sample of children with severe generalized cerebral palsy.
All diagnostic measurements should be ambulatory available and require no active cooperation. Therefore, not all diagnostic methods in this study are "gold-standard" methods. To date, only few diagnostic tests are available, validated for this specific population. Some diagnostic tests used in the present study are applied for the first time in this population, resulting in valuable feasibility data for future validation studies. Since ethical regulations also required methods to be non-invasive when possible, assessment of constipation need to be done without the rectal digital examination, which will therefore provide less information in comparison to the normal diagnostic procedure.
To ensure that people of different nationalities participate in a prevalence study, information needs to be provided in several languages. However, our experience is that there is no need for translated written information brochures and questionnaires. A spoken introduction on compact disc can provide an introduction and interested parents will ask a family member for translation of the brochure and questionnaires.
Finally, the inclusion period was stopped before target sample size was reached, due to delay because of practical reasons discussed above. By the end of our inclusion period, almost a quarter of the children with severe generalized cerebral palsy in the Netherlands had been approached and nearly 10% of the Dutch population of these children participates. Even with less power than desired, this study will be able to put a subject on the map that got little attention up to now.
Representativeness
To stay close to clinical practice, we used inclusion criteria based on disabilities rather than on aetiology, resulting in a heterogeneous group of children. Obviously, this might also cause more heterogeneity of the results.
The participating children are slightly younger of age than the eligible children that did not participate. However, we do not regard an age difference of less then 2 years with a standard deviation of over 4 years, as a clinical relevant discrepancy. Height and weight differences can be explained by age, since BMI is not different between both groups. A relevant discrepancy does seem to be present between the groups with regard to the reported severity of dysphagia, the frequency of lower respiratory tract infections and the presence of gastro-oesophageal reflux. We assume that the parents of the children with more severe health problems were more likely to recognize the health issues of their child in the information brochure and therefore decided to participate more often. Since swallowing strongly depends on motor skills, it seems likely that participants have poorer motor skills in general then the non-participants. Another part of the discrepancy might be explained by the selection of non-eligible children by staff of the centres. On first visit, we had to exclude four children whose motor or intellectual skills were of a higher level than those defined by our inclusion criteria. This might also have been the case in the group that did not consent to participate. Because of the slight discrepancies in characteristics, the final results, especially prevalence rates, have to be interpreted with caution. Despite the discrepancies, our sample is as representative as can be expected in population-based research.
Implication for future studies
Preventive medicine needs to play a major role in the healthcare for children with severe neurological impairment. Consequently, intervention studies are needed in which effects can be measured in a valid and reproducible way, and reference values need to be established. As in any discipline, intervention studies should be based on epidemiological data. To avoid complex epidemiological studies, a health register seems to be a requisite. In such a registry, data on health status, diagnostic assessments and applied medical treatments of children with severe neurological impairment should be recorded. This would also enable specialists to combine knowledge and to monitor trends.
For every study question, one should contemplate on the choice between diagnostic assessments in hospital or on-site. When a representative cohort of children with severe generalized cerebral palsy is required, one should perform a community-based study to keep the burden low and therewith the consent rate as high as possible, but one can expect to encounter the discussed obstacles. The main disadvantage of a hospital-based study is that a selective population will be recruited, even when performed through an outpatient clinic. Furthermore, one should consider that feasibility of diagnostic assessments might be better on-site, due to the fact that the setting is familiar to the child. On the other hand, in hospital-based studies, logistics are less complicated and hospital assessments, such as X-rays, are easily applied.
In conclusion, this study will fill in some of the lacunas in the knowledge of the health status of these children such as prevalence numbers of several health conditions, associations with recurrent pneumonias. It will also provide new information on the diagnostic tools available for these children, and provide experience in performing scientific studies in this specific field.