Treating Neurodevelopmental Disabilities: Clinical Research and Practice. Janet E. Farmer, Jacobus Donders, and Seth Warschausky, eds, New York: The Guilford Press, 2006. 336 pages, hardcover, $48.00, ISBN: 1593852460.

This book provides an overview of the state of the science in treating children with neurodevelopmental disabilities. It covers a wide range of disabilities, including general physical impairments, sensory impairments, chronic illness, autism, spinal cord injury, and traumatic brain injury (TBI). The overall strength of the book is its focus on environmental determinants of outcome for children with disability, especially with regard to family-centered rehabilitation and treatment planning. Clinicians will find the book useful in determining how to implement the most recent family-centered approaches in their practices. An emphasis on transition into schools, and into the workforce for older adolescents, is a further strength that will be useful for clinicians. This book can also serve a unique role as a textbook for graduate training in the area of interventions for children with disabilities, since most existing textbooks focus primarily on assessment and impairment issues. Two of the chapters (Naar-King and Donders' "Pediatric Family-Centered Rehabilitation" and Farmer and Drewel's "Systems of Comprehensive Care") provide tables summarizing the design of studies investigating the interventions proposed. However, an overall weakness of the book is that many of the chapters do not provide enough methodological detail to determine the evidence quality of the studies discussed.

While TBI is addressed in a few chapters as a subset of children with disabilities, 3 chapters focus entirely on children with TBI. The chapter by Donders provides a general overview of the epidemiology, pathophysiology, and cognitive and psychosocial sequelae of TBI. This chapter provides no new information for clinicians who are already working in this area but is a good overview for persons not experienced with this population and for graduate students. Wade's chapter offers a theory-based approach to supporting family members. Her intervention approach is grounded in stress and coping theory and focuses on increasing participants' effective problem-solving skills, as well as teaching them specific strategies to manage cognitive and behavioral difficulties in their children. She presents data from a small randomized clinical trial providing preliminary support for the effectiveness of the intervention. Her work has yielded promising results and certainly provides justification for more extensive clinical trials in this area.

Hibbard and colleagues' chapter on students with acquired brain injury is one of the most well-written and informative chapters in this volume. The chapter begins with a much-needed emphasis on identification of TBI in students who are typically lost in the school system. They advocate widespread screening for TBI in schools, although how this task could be accomplished in the face of overlap between TBI symptoms and other disorders is not clear. Their focus on informal qualitative assessment as a basis for treatment and educational planning is a unique focus of this chapter and can be very useful for clinicians and educators. Their suggestion that school-based assessment teams receive training in cognitive and behavioral effects of TBI and how to evaluate these is well-founded. A further strength of the chapter is the inclusion of a table detailing the types of instructional strategies that may be helpful for various types of difficulties experienced in the classroom by children with TBI. This chapter goes beyond the school setting to emphasize the need for assisting older adolescents in their transition from school to the workforce.

A few other chapters address TBI in a less comprehensive way, including the chapter on pediatric family-centered rehabilitation and the chapter on cultural issues. In summary, this book is a useful reference for clinicians working with children with TBI and for students in training. Since the focus of the TBI-related chapters is on clinical issues, the volume will be less useful for researchers in the area of pediatric TBI. However, the chapters by Wade and Hibbard can serve as a guide to funding agencies that further research emphasis is needed in the areas of school transition and family support.

Angelle M. Sander, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Baylor College ofMedicine/Harris County Hospital District, Houston, Texas