A Preliminary Investigation of the Prevalence of Motor Speech Impairment Within a Pediatric Outpatient Clinical Setting

Background: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a motor speech disorder often co-occurring with language impairment and complex neurodevelopmental disorders. An association between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and CAS has been sug-gested but not definitely quantified. The reported prevalence of CAS has been vari-able. The current study sought to quantify prevalence of apraxia as well as comorbid ASD presentation in a pediatric population in a large outpatient hospitalsetting. Method: An electronic medical record (EMR) was used to identify all pediatric cli-ents between the ages of 24 and 48 months that presented to the outpatient clinic between January 1, 2016, and March 28, 2022. Clients were included that had either a primary or secondary diagnosis of expressive language disorder, language disorder or apraxia with treatment focusing on intelligibility, or articulation disorder. Results: A total of 7,550 results were produced by the EMR, analysis revealed that 1,477 (19.6%) of the children had received a diagnosis of ASD, and 184 (2.4%) received a diagnosis of apraxia. Nineteen of the children with ASD also received a comorbid diagnosis of apraxia (1.3%). In addition, several additional diagnoses comorbidly presenting with CAS were explored, including ASD, mixed expressive-receptive language disorder, phonological disorder, and other develop-mental disorders of speech and language, but none were found to be positive sig-nificant predictors of a CAS diagnosis. Discussion: Findings of the current study (prevalence of CAS at 2.4%) are in agreement with previous literature. Results of comorbidity analysis of ASD and CAS revealed that the presentation of these comorbid diagnoses is not as rare as previously found yet not as frequent.