There are numerous efforts in the healthcare community to increase health care accessibility, education, and support. One of these approaches is “telehealth”, the use of telecommunications methods such as computers and phones to deliver health related services and information. Dr. Anastasia Dimitropoulos at Case Western University is working on a project to determine the feasibility and effectiveness of using telehealth to bring behavioral therapies and interventions to families of those with PWS. They are working on two interventions.
Moving forward in year 2, Dr. Dimitropoulos’ group is going to evaluate the combination of the two interventions, parent training in concert with direct child intervention, again via remote telehealth. This project, "Systematic Investigation of Early Social Cognitive Processes and the Feasibility of Intervention", will include 40 children with PWS (ages 3-9), tailored specifically to each age group with more parent training for families of preschoolers and more direct intervention for school age children. They predict that this combined program will be more effective than each intervention alone at increasing social cognitive ability and decreasing challenging behavior for both preschool and school-age children with PWS.
