Premature birth and disability

NEW YORK, Aug 10 (Praxis Press) Small studies have shown that many children born as extremely preterm infants suffer from neurologic and developmental disabilities, but confirmation by a large-scale study has been lacking. To address this issue, Wood and colleagues conducted a prospective study of all infants born at 20 through 25 completed weeks of gestation in the United Kingdom and Ireland during a 10-month period beginning in March 1995. They measured development, neurologic function, and occurrence of disability in these children. They found that of 308 surviving children who had been formally assessed, 19% had severely delayed development and 49% had disability overall; almost half the children with disability met the criteria for severe disability. This is the first large-scale study to confirm that severe disability is common among children born as extremely preterm infants.