Children born before 34 weeks show a lasting cognitive delay behind peers

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute report that children born before 34 weeks of gestation show persistent deficits in cognitive capacities at ages from 9 to 10 years. Deficps seem to be independent of socioeconomic status, genetic predisposition and prenatal risk factors or specific to children. Lower scores have been observed in vocabulary, working memory, episodic memory and recall tasks. The premature late children (34 to 36 weeks) or a start of the start (37 to 38 weeks) comparable to those born in the long term.

Premature birth affects around 13 million infants worldwide each year and remains a main cause of morbidity and infant mortality. Although progress in perinatal care has increased survival, cognitive deficits in these children continue to present major public health problems.

Critical brain development processes that occur between 24 and 40 weeks of gestation can be disrupted by premature birth. Previous research has mainly focused on extremely or very premature infants, often overlooking moderately or late born, which constitute a large part of the premature births.

Cognitive operation in premature children tends to be lagging behind peer -term, but most research has only measured global cognitive areas, not specific cognitive fields. Existing studies have also lacked complete analysis representing genetic and environmental risks.

In the study, “gestational age and cognitive development in childhood”, published in Jama Network OpenThe researchers conducted a prospective, multicenter and longitudinal longitudinal transversal study to determine whether premature and early births are associated with lower cognitive scores in children aged 9 to 10 compared to term peers, adapting to genetics, prenatal risks and specific factors.

A cohort of 5,946 children, aged 9 to 10, was recruited in the study of brain development and teenage cognitive development, carried out on 21 data collection sites in the United States.

Participants underwent a series of cognitive assessments, including the National Institutes of Health toolbox, the Little Man task and the Rey auditory verbal learning test. Researchers have calculated polygenic scores for cognitive performance using association data at the genome scale and adjusted for a range of maternal, specific to child and socioeconomic variables.

Moderately premature children (32 to 33 weeks of gestation) had lower composite cognitive scores compared to children in the long term. These children also made it possible to make fewer goods in vocabulary, working memory, episodic memory and short and long recall, all results showing measurable deficits in vocabulary and memory comparable to several months of typical learning progress at this age.

Children born before 32 weeks showed similar deficits while children born at 34 weeks or later had indiscriminate cognitive results from their peers.

The authors of the study conclude that the cognitive deficiencies linked to moderately premature birth persist at the end of childhood and are not explained by socioeconomic status, the genetic context or other known risk factors. The results indicate that children born before 34 weeks may require continuous monitoring and support to meet the challenges of development that extend at school age.

Early screening and intervention are described as potentially beneficial to improve long -term cognitive results. Cognitive deficits at this age are often associated with a lower academic realization and a reduced quality of life, strengthening the need for targeted resources for premature children.

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