Therapeutic Pitfalls in the Transition of Neurologic Patients from Pediatric to Adult Health Care Providers.

Transitions of care from the pediatric to adult setting are fraught with difficulty. For patients whose neurologic problems began in childhood, there is often a lack of organized multidisciplinary care with the desired neurologic expertise in the adult setting. This monograph highlights those difficulties, reviewing disease-specific instances of the problems with transition from pediatric to adult neurologic care. The use of an arbitrary chronologic age cutoff for transition from pediatric to adult expertise in specific disease state may be a disservice in provision of care, and the disease-specific expertise of providers may outweigh the benefit of an age-related provider focus.