The Pediatric Eating Assessment Tool

The evaluation of pediatric swallowing disorders includes clinical and instrumental techniques. The clinical evaluation is important for clinical decision-making and to assess the need for an instrumental evaluation of swallowing. A recent systematic review suggested that the currently available non-instrumental assessments for clinicians to evaluate swallowing and feeding function in the pediatric population have wide variations in design, assessment domains, and target groups. It was concluded that there is a significant need for standardized assessment tools with good psychometric properties in the pediatric population. The existing instruments measure the presence or absence and frequency of challenges related to eating/feeding problems in pediatrics, they do not comprehensively measure oropharyngeal phase swallowing problems or do not reflect the severity of oropharyngeal dysphagia symptoms. The 10-item Eating Assessment Tool (EAT-10), which was designed for adult patients, is a good model for this current research. It has proven highly successful in quantifying initial dysphagia symptom severity and in monitoring treatment efficacy in a vast array of dysphagia etiologies. Although the EAT-10 is a symptom survey, it has been able to predict objective evidence of swallowing dysfunction. There is no dysphagia spesific and patient/parent centered outcome instrument in the pediatric population such as the EAT-10. The purpose of this investigation is to develop the Pediatric version of the Eating Assessment Tool (PEDI-EAT-10) and investigate its validity and reliability.