Adapted from BMJ 21 Jan 2023 Gestational age at birth and later cognition.
It is always a worry for parents when they have a premature baby. Will my baby be physically normal? Will they have brain damage?
A Danish study looked at almost 800,000 children who had been born between 1986 and 2003. Comment: this is of interest to me because I was born at 34 weeks and weighed 2 pounds 3 ounces. Also I worked in obstetrics in 1984 and neonatal paediatrics in 1986.
They compared their characteristics at birth with language and mathematics assessments at age 16. The assessors had no knowledge of the children. Sex, birth weight, malformations, parental age at birth, parental educational level, number of older siblings and shared family factors between siblings were adjusted for, as these are known to have effects on intelligence levels.
The results showed that for both language skills and mathematics, levels plateaued off at 34 weeks and remained constant till 41 weeks. Babies born at 42 or more weeks actually showed a slight decrease in language and mathematical skills.
For babies born at 27 weeks or more, there was a reduction in both language and mathematical skills. Week on week there was a steady improvement till 34 weeks. Mathematical skills were over twice much impaired compared to language skills.
Exactly how these differences affect real life outcomes such as educational attainment or lifetime income has not been assessed in this study.
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