The prevalence and predictive value of weak language skills in children with very low birth weight – a longitudinal study

Abstract

The prevalence of weak language skills in VLBW children increased during the follow-up period and was higher than the controls. Language-sensitive methods should be used in the clinical follow-up of VLBW children.

Neuropsychological Functioning in Preterm-Born Twins and Singletons at Preschool Age

“…A longitudinal investigation will facilitate exploration of age-related effects of multiplicity on neuropsychological outcome domains in children born prematurely. In accord with a recent report of age-related decline in language performance in preterm children (Stolt et al, 2014), it is possible that multiplicity contributes a share to these phenomena. For instance, multiplicity may “exert” negligible developmental outcome effects in infancy that evolve into modest to moderate effects in late preschool age and larger effects in the primary and middle school years.…”

Prevalence of Language Delay among Healthy Preterm Children, Language Outcomes and Predictive Factors

“…The instruments used are not the same in all the studies, which is comprehensible given the differences in the ages of assessment. In many of them different adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) to different languages were used to assess children of 30 months of age or younger [21,[30][31][32][33]. In these cases, lack of agreement in the results indicates that other factors must be responsible for the discrepancy.…”

“…In other cases, the limit was a certain point of SD in relation to the normative sample. Two investigations, however, when establishing the cut-off point did not use the normative sample of the test as a reference but used the FT control group instead [29,33]. This fact shed some doubts upon the adequacy of the comparisons just in case the participants chosen for the FT group might have had a higher performance not coincident with the norms.…”

“…In these cases, children with major cerebral damage, such as IVH higher than II or PLM, hydrocephalus, BPD, retinopathy of prematurity, visual or hearing impairment or congenital malformations were excluded. In other cases, the criteria were less strict, and only children with some of these criteria were excluded: congenital abnormalities, chromosomal anomalies, coming from homes where the language of the community was not spoken, admission to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), or mother's use of alcohol or drugs during pregnancy [29,33] were excluded. Other studies do not offer information on the exclusion criteria (Charolais et al, 2014; Lee and Lee, 2016), which does not guaranty (all the contrary) that the sample of PT children are free of these biomedical hazards (IVH, PLM, BPD, etc.).…”

“…It seems reasonable to think that these differences in the inclusion/exclusion criteria may have important consequences in the differences found regarding the prevalence of language delay. It is enlightening that when Stolt et al [33] compared only VPT children without neurological damage with FT children, the differences in percentages of LD children are lower, and no significant differences in LD were found in the tasks administered, with the exception of the Nepsy language score at 5 years of age. Complementarily, when VPR children have additional handicaps (such as BPD) they show a higher incidence of language impairment, which may rise to 43% [27,30].…”