Bernard Maumbe is an ENRICH Master’s fellow and a Master of Public Health Student at Busitema University, Uganda. He is a senior medical officer at Busia HCIV, Mbale. He holds a bachelor’s degree in medicine and surgery from Makerere University, Uganda.  He conducted a study on neurodevelopment among children under five years with sickle cell disease in Eastern Uganda _across sectional study.

Study summary

This cross-sectional study investigated neurodevelopment among 350 children under five years old (117 with sickle cell disease [SCD] and 233 without SCD) at Mbale Regional Referral Hospital in Eastern Uganda, assessing developmental age z-scores (DAZ) via the Malawi Developmental Assessment Tool. The key findings show that children with SCD had significantly lower overall developmental scores and poorer performance across all domains—social, gross motor, fine motor, and language—than community controls, with an adjusted average exposure effect of -0.87. Furthermore, among children with SCD, those enrolled on hydroxyurea demonstrated slightly higher social and language domain scores than those not on treatment. These results underscore the high neurodevelopmental vulnerability associated with early childhood SCD in low-resource settings, supporting the urgent need to integrate routine developmental screening and timely interventions into comprehensive SCD care programs.