Jack is a 2.5 year old boy. He has been referred for developmental assessment by his health visitor. His community paediatrician diagnoses speech and language delay. His mother reports he first sat independently at 9 months and walked at 17 months.

Structured clinical question

In a male child with speech delay who walks prior to 18 months old [patient], does requesting serum creatine kinase [intervention] help diagnose Duchenne muscular dystrophy with reasonable efficiency [outcome]?

Search strategy and outcome

PubMed: “Duchenne muscular dystrophy,” “speech delay”, combined with “screening” and “language”. Sixteen references were found in total.

OMIM database and specific journals: The titles and the abstracts were …