Accurate diagnoses are important, especially for supporting individuals with intellectual development disorders. Columbia faculty members Dr. Tahilia Rebello and Dr. Geoffrey Reed collaborated with a global team of researchers and scholars to conduct an important study that was recently published in the Journal of Intellectual Disability Research.
About the study: Within the ICD-11 Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Requirements for Mental, Behavioural or Neurodevelopmental Disorders, behavioral indicators (BIs) are included to help clinicians assess the severity of disorders of intellectual development (DID). Because the ICD-11 is the global standard for diagnosis and health information reporting, the study team (Lemay et al., 2022) aimed to examine the reliability, validity, and clinical utility of BIs internationally.
The field study explored inter-rater reliability, concurrent validity, and clinical utility of the BIs for the assessment of children and adolescents with DID in India, Italy, and Sri Lanka. The results showed that the BIs performed consistently well in varying cultural, linguistic, and economic settings and were also rated as useful by clinicians. These results suggest that the inclusion of the BIs within the ICD-11 can facilitate the accurate diagnosis of individuals with DID across varying contexts and can be especially useful in settings where specialized clinical services or specialized diagnostic tools may not be available.
Citation: Lemay, K. R., Kogan, C.S, Rebello, T. J., Keeley, J. W., Bhargava, R., Sharan, P., Sharma, M., Kommu, J. V. S., Kishore, M. T. , Jesus de Mari, J., Ginige, P., Buono, S., Recupero, M., Zingale, M., Zagaria, T., Cooray, S., Roy, A., Reed, G. M. (2022). An international field study of the ICD‐11 behavioural indicators for disorders of intellectual development. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 66(4), 376-391. https://doi.org/10.1111/jir.12924
