14 DAY TRIAL // According to British researchers who have just recently published a new scientific study on the matter, children who are born very prematurely are highly likely to have a way lower IQ than their peers. They are also even more prone to needing additional assistance in coping with the demands of primary schools, and especially with issues related to mathematics. Some 220 kids who were around the age of 11 were tested in the new study, and all of them had been delivered before their time.
A pregnancy is considered to be premature if the infant is born 2 to 3 weeks before of the established term. If the gestation only lasts less than 27 weeks (out of the 39 or 40 that a regular one does), the child is considered to have been born extremely prematurely. The reason for the new study has been the now-famous US mother who has given birth to octuplets, all of which have come into the world 9 weeks ahead of schedule. According to the UK team, these calculations should be on the mind of each couple expecting a child, and the pregnancy should be allowed to last as much as possible.
The 219 kids that were studied in this investigation were compared to 153 of their classmates, who were born after a normal gestation period. The assessment of the differences between the two groups was made by taking into account only standard IQ tests and other academic achievements. Teachers were also brought into the loop, and they offered their own take on how each of the youngsters was doing, and on whether some of them needed special attention in order to be able to cope with increasing demands.
The study also revealed that 33 percent of the kids who were born extremely prematurely found it difficult to read at the age of 11, while about a half of them considered mathematics to be a mystery. The researchers have concluded that simultaneous processing of complex data is something that these children are not very good at, maybe on account of the fact that their brain connections weren't sufficiently strong before they exited the womb.
“The impact of these impairments is likely to increase over time. Existing difficulties may be exacerbated in secondary school when cognitive demands increase in parallel with progressively complex academic studies,” University College London (UCL) Institute for Women's Health expert Neil Marlow, who is also one of the authors of the new paper published in the early online Fetal and Neonatal Edition of the scientific journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, says.