1997 Volume 34 Issue 4 Pages 63-68
The purpose of this investigation was to explore developmental subgroups of infants with Down syndrome. Participants were 150 children with Down Syndrome, between 1 and 3 years old, all of whom had been diagnosed as standard trisomy 21. Each age group consisted of 50 subjects. Mothers' evaluations of their children's development on Tsumori-Inage's questionnaire of infants' mental development were used. Cluster-analysis was employed to classify their data. The following findings were obtained from this analysis: 1) The 1-year-old group divided into 3 subgroups; the 2- and 3-years-old groups divided into 5 subgroups. 2) Profile patterns of 5 sub-domains (motor, exploration, and manipulation; social behavior; eating; custom of excretion and toilet training; speech and comprehension) that emerged for each subgroup exhibited different patterns in each age group. Each subgroup at all ages varied in terms of the combination of their development in the 5 sub-domains. 3) These findings suggest that the subgroup that developed fastest separated from the other subgroups from around the time the children were age 3, and the subgroup slowest in developing separated at age 1.
