Preschool development of very low birth weight children born 1994-1995

This study reports on the developmental outcome of a sample of pre-term children with a birth weight less than or equal to 1500 g born in 1994 and 1995 studied at the age of 5 to 6 years. The sample included 60 out of 81 surviving pre-term children (74.1 %) of a German neonatal intensive care unit which was matched to a control group of 60 kindergarten children of the same region. The results show significant differences between term and preterm children with regard to their intellectual development, language comprehension, attentiveness, and hyperactivity. Moreover, the pre-term children required more early intervention to compensate for developmental problems. The developmental deficits were intensified by the presence of biological risk factors like increasingly low birth weight, bronchopulmonary dysplasia and intraventricular haemorrhage. Conclusion: differences between term and pre-term children still exist, although the early 1990s witnessed fundamental changes in the treatment of pre-term children. The persistence of these differences is explained mainly by the increase in the survival rate of children with high biological risk factors.