Extremely premature babies are those born in week 28 or earlier. More and more of these babies can be saved, but there is a major risk of them suffering brain haemorrhages, lung diseases, gastrointestinal problems and eye diseases during their first weeks of life.

The present study, conducted by Lund University psychologist Johanna Månsson, included some 400 extremely premature babies and an equal number of babies born at full term. At the age of two and a half, the children underwent various psychological tests, and the results show that those born prematurely performed significantly worse that the full-term babies on cognition, speech, language understanding and gross and fine motor skills.

The differences remained even after adjustments were made for level of parental education, mother’s country of birth, mother’s age at childbirth and other factors that usually affect children’s performance in psychological tests.

The premature children were also more likely to have behavioural problems than those born at full term. The children were often socially withdrawn or had concentration difficulties.

“It is not unusual for problems to occur in the parent-child relationship when the child is seriously ill”, said Johanna Månsson. “Parents may be struggling under the weight of worries about their seriously ill premature baby. Other studies have shown that the behavioural problems that sometimes affect children born prematurely can be linked to parents’ mental health.”

Johanna Månsson also discovered major differences between premature girls and boys.

“It turned out that premature boys were more vulnerable than girls”, she said. “They were no more ill than the girls at birth, but by two and a half they had considerably poorer results on cognition, language and motor skills.”

However, despite clear differences between premature and full-term babies, most of the children born prematurely were still within the ‘normal range’.

“By detecting the problems that premature children experience early, measures can more quickly be put in place to help them”, said Johanna Månsson. “This could be anything from working on the parent-child relationship to memory training.”

Publication:
Johanna Månsson’s PhD thesis is entitled Born near the limit of viability – developmental outcomes 2.5 years later, and is part of the national multidisciplinary project Extremely Preterm Infants in Sweden Study (EXPRESS)”

Contact:
 Johanna [dot] mansson [at] psy [dot] lu [dot] se (Johanna[dot]mansson[at]psy[dot]lu[dot]se)
+46 706 728378