Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Delays in Preterm Children
Preterm children are born at less than 37 weeks of gestation. As they mature, this group of children demonstrates a high rate neurodevelopmental disorders such as cerebral palsy and mental retardation. These children also display higher rates developmental delays than do full term children. Later in life even preterm children without serious neurological difficulties or developmental delays as a group perform lower on measures of intelligence, academic achievement, and motor skills than do full term children. These differences can be observed well into adolescence. For children born preterm the severity of any difficulties they might suffer is inversely related to the number of weeks of gestation they experienced. One of the reasons that this group demonstrates these physical and cognitive discrepancies may be due to a lack of thyroid hormones the child would normally receive from the mother in utero. These hormones have been demonstrated to be important in early neuronal differentiation and proliferation. Nonetheless, there is evidence that for preterm children without serious physical or neurological disorders that environmental manipulations, parental education, and age-corrected expectations can attenuate these difficulties significantly.