Evaluating direct play intervention for preschoolers and long-term follow-up of the PRETEND program

Funding Summary

The PRETEND program, developed by Dr. Dimitropoulos and her team, has been shown to improve aspects of social, emotional, and cognitive functioning in preschool and school age children with PWS. The purpose of this funded project is to make the PRETEND Program available to more families by establishing a platform to train interventionists to use this program for broader dissemination. This project will also aim to improve the program for preschool children by adapting the protocol for in-person intervention and will explore the long-term effects of the program.

Lay Abstract

In recent years, there has been a targeted attempt to address behavioral and social-cognitive concerns related to Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS). However, there are few studies on how to address these concerns. One such study is the PRETEND [Play-based Remote Enrichment to Enhance Development] Program. The PRETEND Program uses pretend play as a way of improving social, emotional, and cognitive functioning in children with PWS. The PRETEND Program has shown to be helpful in improving these areas of functioning in school-age and preschool-age children. Research has shown that children with PWS who completed the intervention increased skills in imagination, the variety of emotion used in play, and the number of story ideas they generated. These improvements were shown to be comparable to a typically developing reference sample and are core features of social cognitive development. The purpose of this project is to make the PRETEND Program available to more families through finalizing a platform to train interventionists to use this program for broader dissemination. In addition, we aim to improve the program for preschool children by adapting the protocol for in-person intervention and will explore the long-term effects of the program. This research is important as there are currently very few programs that aim to address social, emotional, and cognitive issues in children with PWS. Even fewer programs are available for preschool children, and none have investigated the long-term effects of behavioral intervention specific to PWS. If the training portion of the proposed study is successful, we plan to make the online training platform widely available, training more providers to deliver the PRETEND Program and increasing access to an effective treatment program. The results from the follow-up portion of this study will offer the first insights into the long-term effects of the PRETEND Program, providing important information regarding the development of future treatment efforts. The proposed study will both advance and lay the foundation for further advances in therapeutic development by evaluating the possibility of successfully expanding intervention efforts and providing more information on the long-term effects of one of the few behavioral interventions for children with PWS.