Aim To examine how the ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic impacts child well‐being and family functioning, particularly among children at risk for neurodevelopmental impairments. Methods Families of 73 typically developing children, 54 children born very preterm (VPT) and 73 children with congenital heart disease (CHD) from two prospective cohort studies were assessed prior to (mean age: 10.4 [SD: 1.2] years) and during (mean age: 12.8 [SD: 2.0] years) the pandemic, more specifically, in April/May 2020. Child well‐being and family functioning were assessed with validated, parent‐reported questionnaires and tested with linear mixed models. Group comparison of child distress and parental concerns related to medical implications of COVID‐19 and homeschooling, assessed with 5‐point Likert scales, was done with Mann–Whitney U tests. Results Children's psychological well‐being and family functioning (both, p < 0.001) decreased significantly during the pandemic, irrespective of group. Children with CHD were reported to be more concerned about becoming infected with SARS‐CoV‐2 than were others. Child distress due to homeschooling and parents' concerns about children's academic achievements were significantly higher in VPT and CHD children than in typically developing peers (all p < 0.001). Conclusion The COVID‐19 pandemic substantially impacts the whole family and leads to additional distress in families with children at risk for neurodevelopmental impairments. These families should receive individualised counselling and assistance from healthcare providers and schools during the pandemic.

Evidence is accumulating that individual and environmental factors in childhood and adolescence should be considered when investigating adult health and aging-related processes. The data required for this is gathered by comprehensive long-term longitudinal studies. This article describes the protocol of the Zurich Longitudinal Studies (ZLS), a set of three comprehensive cohort studies on child growth, health, and development that are currently expanding into adulthood. Between 1954 and 1961, 445 healthy infants were enrolled in the first ZLS cohort. Their physical, motor, cognitive, and social development and their environment were assessed comprehensively across childhood, adolescence, and into young adulthood. In the 1970s, two further cohorts were added to the ZLS and assessed with largely matched study protocols: Between 1974 and 1979, the second ZLS cohort included 265 infants (103 term-born and 162 preterm infants), and between 1970 and 2002, the third ZLS cohort included 327 children of participants of the first ZLS cohort. Since 2019, the participants of the three ZLS cohorts have been traced and invited to participate in a first wave of assessments in adulthood to investigate their current health and development. This article describes the ZLS study protocol and discusses opportunities, methodological and conceptual challenges, and limitations arising from a long-term longitudinal cohort recruited from a study about development in early life. In the future, the ZLS will provide data to investigate childhood antecedents of adult health outcomes and, ultimately, will help respond to the frequent call of scientists to shift the focus of aging research into the first decades of life and, thus, to take a lifespan perspective on aging.

Background. Visuospatial dysfunction is among the first cognitive symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD) and is often predictive for PD-dementia. Furthermore, cognitive status in PD-patients correlates with quantitative EEG. This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate the correlation between EEG slowing and visuospatial ability in nondemented PD-patients. Methods. Fifty-seven nondemented PD-patients (17 females/40 males) were evaluated with a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery and a high-resolution 256-channel EEG was recorded. A median split was performed for each cognitive test dividing the patients sample into either a normal or lower performance group. The electrodes were split into five areas: frontal, central, temporal, parietal, and occipital. A linear mixed effects model (LME) was used for correlational analyses and to control for confounding factors. Results. Subsequently, for the lower performance, LME analysis showed a significant positive correlation between ROCF score and parietal alpha/theta ratio (b = .59, p = .012) and occipital alpha/theta ratio (b = 0.50, p = .030). No correlations were found in the group of patients with normal visuospatial abilities. Conclusion. We conclude that a reduction of the parietal alpha/theta ratio is related to visuospatial impairments in PD-patients. These findings indicate that visuospatial impairment in PD-patients could be influenced by parietal dysfunction.

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