Cognitive, motor, behavioural and academic performances of children born preterm: a meta‐analysis and systematic review involving 64 061 children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Preterm birth may leave the brain vulnerable to dysfunction. Knowledge of future neurodevelopmental delay in children born with various degrees of prematurity is needed to inform practice and policy. Objective To quantify the long‐term cognitive, motor, behavioural and academic performance of children born with different degrees of prematurity compared with term‐born children. Search strategy PubMed and Embase were searched from January 1980 to December 2016 without language restrictions. Selection criteria Observational studies that reported neurodevelopmental outcomes from 2 years of age in children born preterm compared with a term‐born cohort. Data collection and analysis We pooled individual estimates of standardised mean differences ( SMD ) and odds ratios ( OR ) with 95% confidence intervals using a random effects model. Main results We included 74 studies (64 061 children). 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 effect observed according to the severity of prematurity ( I 2 = 49.4%, P = 0.03). Conclusions Prematurity of any degree affects the cognitive performance of children born preterm. The poor neurodevelopment persists at various ages of follow up. Parents, educators, healthcare professionals and policy makers need to take into account the additional academic, emotional and behavioural needs of these children. Tweetable abstract Adverse effect of preterm birth on a child's neurodevelopment persists up to adulthood.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.014 | 0.025 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".