Neurodevelopment and Risk Factors in Infants Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic in Eastern China: Cross-Sectional Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Emerging studies suggest that exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic may have heightened the risks of neurodevelopmental disorders in infants (0-1-year-old); however, population-based studies investigating these associations in Chinese contexts remain scarce, particularly including the postpandemic phase. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to characterize the dynamic changes in neurodevelopment among infants in eastern China during distinct phases of the COVID-19 pandemic and to identify the critical risk factors associated with infant neurodevelopmental delays. METHODS: This cross-sectional study analyzes 17,621 Peabody Developmental Motor Scales-II (PDMS-II) assessments and 7877 Bayley Scales of Infant Development-Chinese Cities Revised (BSID-CR) scores of infants who visited a tertiary maternal and children hospital for routine neurodevelopment assessment from January 2019 to July 2023. Multivariate logistic regression models were used to evaluate the associations of COVID-19 pandemic phases (stage I: prepandemic, January 2, 2019, to January 22, 2020; stage II: pandemic, January 23, 2020, to December 18, 2022; and stage III: postpandemic, December 19, 2022, to July 31, 2023), seasonal variations, and perinatal variables (eg, delivery mode, birth weight, gender) with the neurodevelopmental outcomes. RESULTS: Infants assessed at stage II of the COVID-19 pandemic had a higher risk of neurodevelopmental delay compared to infants assessed at stage I (total motor quotient: odds ratio [OR] 2.84, 95% CI 2.17-3.72; fine motor quotient: OR 2.71, 95% CI 1.99-3.68) and stage III (total motor quotient, OR 2.52, 95% CI 1.79-3.55; gross motor quotient: OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.21-2.25; fine motor quotient: OR 3.40, 95% CI 2.36-4.92). Infants assessed at stage III had the highest risk of mental development delay (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.91-3.36). In addition, cesarean delivery, male gender, and low birth weight were independent risk factors of neurodevelopmental delay (P<.05). CONCLUSIONS: The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities in infants, persisting into the postpandemic period. Public health strategies should mitigate the long-term effects through early interventions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".