RIYADH, 22 February — The scientific committee of the Trustee Council of Prince Salman Center for Disability Research has approved three areas for research. The documents commissioning eminent researchers from King Saud University to conduct the study were co-signed by Prince Sultan ibn Salman, chairman of the council, here recently.
Professor Saeed ibn Abdullah Ibrahim Debais, from the Department of Psychology at the College of Education at KSU, will conduct research on psychometric scale for behavioral problems of the disabled Saudi children. The study will aim at devising five or six psychological scales for assessing the behavioral problems for those incapacitated through four kinds of handicap namely: mental retardation, blindness, hearing impairments and physical disabilities.
The work will be conducted on subjects chosen from around 3,600 children all over the country and the final findings are to be presented in 16 months.
The second project, to be undertaken by Professor Abdul Rahman ibn Yousif Al-Tahan, a consultant neurologist at the College of Medicine, will make a clinical epidemiological study of stroke-related disabilities and their associated risks. He will study the prognostic factors of a cerebral vascular attack, commonly known as stroke. Around 100 incapacitated children in Riyadh and nearby areas will be the subjects of this study which will take a year and a half to complete.
The third assignment, approved for Professor Dr. Mustafa Abdullah Muhammad Salih of the Department of Pediatrics at the College of Medicine, will highlight the clinical features, etiology, risk factors and prognosis of stroke in Saudi children. A retrospective study of the incidence of CVA in the Kingdom during the last eight years will also be included in the research which is expected to take about two years.
In a speech on the occasion, Prince Sultan also introduced Dr. Terrence Dolan, the new executive director of the center. Dr. Mohsin Faris Al-Hazmi, director of WHO coordinating center for genetic disorders and head of the Department of Biochemistry at the KSU College of Medicine, was supervising the center.
Dr. Dolan, the former director of the world-famous Weizman Center for the Handicapped at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had presented three papers at the second international conference on disability and rehabilitation held in Riyadh last October.
