Allotey J, et al. - This study is performed to evaluate the long-term cognitive, motor, behavioural and academic performance of children born with different degrees of prematurity compared with term-born children. Prematurity of any degree influences the cognitive performance of children born preterm. At various ages of follow-up, the poor neurodevelopment persists. Parents, educators, healthcare professionals and policymakers need to take into account the additional academic, emotional and behavioural requirements of these children.

Methods

• From January 1980 to December 2016, they searched PubMed and Embase without language restrictions.
• For this research, they selected those observational studies that reported neurodevelopmental outcomes from 2 years of age in children born preterm compared with a term-born cohort.
• They pooled individual assessments of standardized mean differences (SMD) and odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals utilizing a random effects model.

Results

• Total 74 studies including 64061 children were selected.
• In this study, preterm children had lower cognitive scores for FSIQ (SMD: -0.70; 95% CI: -0.73 to -0.66), PIQ (SMD: -0.67; 95% CI: -0.73 to -0.60) and VIQ (SMD: -0.53; 95% CI: -0.60 to -0.47).
• Lower scores for preterm children in motor skills, behaviour, reading, mathematics and spelling were observed at primary school age, and this persisted to secondary school age, except for mathematics.
• Gestational age at birth accounted for 38-48% of the observed IQ variance.
• ADHD was diagnosed twice as often in preterm children (OR: 1.6; 95% CI: 1.3-1.8), with a differential impact observed according to the severity of prematurity (I²= 49.4%, P= 0.03).