A practical approach to reporting treatment abandonment in pediatric chronic conditions

Treatment abandonment, the failure to complete therapy that is required for definitive disease control, frequently causes treatment failure for pediatric patients in low‐ and middle‐income countries with chronic conditions, particularly cancer. Other forms of incomplete treatment affecting children in all settings, such as nonadherence and loss to follow‐up, are often confused with treatment abandonment. Unclear definitions of incomplete treatment dramatically affect reported outcomes. To facilitate disease‐specific and cross‐sector analyses, we outline a practical approach to categorize forms of incomplete treatment, present distinct semantic categories with case examples and provide an algorithm that could be tailored to disease‐ and context‐specific needs. Pediatr Blood Cancer 2015;62:565–570. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Psychometric evaluation of social phobia and anxiety inventory for children (SPAI-C) and social anxiety scale for children-revised (SASC-R)

The study evaluated the psychometric properties of Finnish versions of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children (SPAI-C) and the Social Anxiety Scale for Children-Revised (SASC-R). 352 students (M = 12.2 years) participated in the study and completed the SPAI-C and SASC-R. In addition, 68 participants (M = 12.2 years) and their parents were interviewed with the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School Aged Children (K-SADS-PL). The SPAI-C was more sensitive for identifying youth meeting criteria for social phobia (SP), whereas the SASC-R demonstrated greater specificity. The youth in this sample had lower mean total scores on the self-report questionnaires than did those in the original validitation studies of the SPAI-C and SASC-R conducted in America. These findings question whether cross-cultural differences in the expression of SP influence the clinical cut-off scores used in translated versions of social anxiety questionnaires.