Role of ESSENCE for preschool children with neurodevelopmental disorders

Early Symptomatic Syndromes Eliciting Neurodevelopmental Examinations (ESSENCE) has been proposed as a guide to the neurodevelopmental needs of the under 5s. The problems are their multiplicity, the presence of partial features of specific conditions e.g. autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and the young age of the children. For these reasons, child development teams often leave families to cope with very difficult situations. This paper includes epilepsy and the cerebral palsies to see if providing precise diagnostic categories and therapeutic targets can be achieved. It includes a discussion of causal sequences which have yet to be applied comprehensively to the neurodevelopment disorders.