{"doi":"10.1002/mus.28296","title":"The <scp>BELS</scp> questionnaire: A novel screening tool for neurodevelopmental and psychiatric symptoms in pediatric dystrophinopathy","abstract":"INTRODUCTION/AIMS: Pediatric patients with dystrophinopathies [Becker and Duchenne muscular dystrophy (BDMD)] are more likely to have neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions. This prospective pilot study tested a novel screening questionnaire developed to identify the common behavioral (B), emotional (E), learning (L), and social (S) difficulties in BDMD. METHODS: A total of 45 caregivers of BDMD patients (ages 4-19 years) seen at the Arkansas Children's Hospital Dystrophinopathy Clinic completed the BELS questionnaire during standard clinic visits. To establish external validity, caregivers also completed four well-validated standardized questionnaires assessing overlapping symptoms [Pediatric Symptom Checklist-17 (PSC-17), Colorado Learning Difficulties Questionnaire (CLDQ), the obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) subscale from the Revised Children's Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS), and Barkley Deficits in Executive Functioning Scale (BDEFS)]. RESULTS: Caregivers reported high rates of behavioral (>60%), emotional (50%-70%), learning (50%-70%), and social (30%-50%) concerns, even though relatively few patients had clinical diagnoses related to these symptoms. Passive suicidality (i.e., thoughts of death) were also common (22.2%; 10/45 patients). The BELS questionnaire was moderately to highly correlated with total scores on the four well-validated questionnaires (p < .001), and BELS subscales showed specificity. A BELS score of 21 corresponded with the established PSC-17 cutoff. DISCUSSION: The BELS questionnaire shows promise as a screening questionnaire to identify neurobehavioral and neuropsychiatric symptoms common in dystrophinopathy. While BELS cannot currently be used as a standalone measure to make clinical diagnoses, identification of symptoms that warrant further follow-up may improve clinical care and quality of life.","journal":"Muscle & Nerve","year":2024,"id":447911,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9435,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":323374,"name":"Seth T. Sorensen","orcid":"0000-0003-3263-7973","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1266518,"name":"Rachel Bearden","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1266519,"name":"Brett Haley","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":782308,"name":"Beverly J. Spray","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":395877,"name":"Kathi Kinnett","orcid":"0000-0002-2704-7349","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1266520,"name":"Rachel Schrader","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1266034,"name":"Aravindhan Veerapandiyan","orcid":"0000-0002-3065-3956","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1266035,"name":"Mary K. Colvin","orcid":"0000-0002-3153-9776","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1266517,"name":"Natalie Truba","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":17,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:02:03.354708Z","pmid":"39569705","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}