Original ArticleDevelopment of Preschool and Academic Skills in Children Born Very Preterm
Section snippets
Methods
The Figure describes the inclusion procedure of very preterm children. The final study sample of 200 very preterm (≤30 weeks) children was derived from all (n = 706) very preterm surviving singletons admitted between 1996 and 2004 to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of the Erasmus University Medical Center-Sophia Children's Hospital in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Twins were excluded because inclusion of these children would violate the assumption of independence of data. Disabilities
Results
Table I presents information on sample characteristics for the very preterm (n = 200) and comparison groups (n = 230). The very preterm group had a significantly lower mean IQ (F = 111.5, P < .001), lower mean level of parental education (χ2 = 50.4, P < .001), and more minor disabilities (χ2 = 27.8, P < .001) than the comparison group. There were no group differences for age at assessment (F = .09, P = .8) or sex (χ2 = 1.1, P = .3). Table II lists the perinatal characteristics of very preterm
Discussion
In our meta-analysis, we showed that academic areas of weakness in very preterm children encompass reading, mathematics/arithmetic, and spelling.2 Information on preschool skills in these children, however, was lacking, and it remained unknown whether very preterm children already perform more poorly than peers at an early school age when they enter primary school or as they grow older.
This study shows that in preschool very preterm children do well in early linguistics, but have significant
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The authors declare no conflicts of interest.