Original articleSpecific Language Difficulties and School Achievement in Children Born at 25 Weeks of Gestation or Less
Section snippets
Subjects
The derivation and characteristics of this study population have been described previously,13, 14 as have the details of the 6-year evaluation.12 The population represents all surviving children born at 25 weeks, 6 days gestational age or less between March and December 1995. Of the 308 children known to be alive at age 30 months, the parents of 241 consented to the study. A total of 204 children were in mainstream education. For each child assessed in a mainstream school, we sought an age- and
Cognitive Scores
The mean scores for all children and boys and girls separately have been reported in detail previously.12 The mean MPC score was 105.7 (SD ± 1.8) for the comparison children and 82.1 (SD ± 19.2) for the extremely preterm children, a difference of 23.6 points (95% confidence interval [CI] = 20.3 to 26.8). In the comparison group, boys and girls had similar scores. In contrast, index boys (mean, 77.1 ± 19.6) scored lower than index girls (mean, 87.2 ± 17.4); the difference in means was 10.1
Discussion
In this entire population cohort of extremely preterm children in the UK and Ireland, we found considerable differences in general cognitive ability (IQ), language, phonetic awareness, articulation, and scholastic achievement compared with their classmates of the same age. These differences were more pronounced in this population than those observed in other studies of more mature very preterm or VLBW populations, in whom disadvantages have been described over a wide range of cognitive
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A list of EPICURE Study Group members is available at www.jpeds.com.