The Association of Urbanicity with Cognitive Development at Five Years of Age in Preterm Children

Abstract

ObjectiveTo determine the association of urbanicity, defined as living in an urban area, with cognitive development at five years of age in preterm children who were free of any disabilities or neurodevelopmental delays.DesignProspective population-based cohort.SettingFrench regional Loire Infant Follow-up Team (LIFT) network.ParticipantsIncluded in the study were 1738 surviving infants born between March 2003 and December 2008 before 35 weeks of gestational age. At two years of age, the children were free of any disabilities and neurodevelopmental delays and were living in the Pays de la Loire region from their birth to five years of age.Main Outcome MeasuresThe cognitive development at five years of age was evaluated with the Global School Adaptation score (GSA). The urbanicity of the residence for each child was classified into three groups: urban, quasi-rural, and rural area.ResultsQuantile regression approaches were used to identify a significant association between urbanicity and the GSA score at five years of age (adjusting for child and family characteristics). We found that the negative impact of urbanicity on the GSA score was more important for the lower quantile of the GSA scores.ConclusionsUrbanicity was significantly associated with cognitive neurodevelopment at five years of age in preterm children born before 35 weeks of gestation. Complementary results additionally suggest that this relation could be mediated at the residence level by a high socioeconomic deprivation level. If these results are confirmed, more personalized follow-ups could be developed for preterm children. Further studies are needed to finely identify the contextual characteristics of urbanicity that underlie this association.

Temperament Predicts Processing Speed in Low Socioeconomic Status Rural Preschoolers

“…Interestingly, we neither find a relation between processing speed and the other individual nor socioenvironmental variables. This result disagree with previous studies that showed a relation between these factors and cognitive performance: parental education (Foulkes & Mori, ; Mykerezi et al, ; Tine, ), father's occupation and overcrowding (Ngure et al, ) as well as past preschool attendance (Castro & Rolleston, ; Gouin et al, ) have been associated with rural child cognitive achievement. In fact, our results suggested an effect of SES (linked with socioenvironmental variables) since these children obtained a mean processing speed performance lower than expected for their age.…”

“…Some studies used general cognitive development test (e.g. Gouin et al, ; Mykerezi et al, ; Ngure et al, ); others used specific skills tests—different from processing speed (Tine, ) and a final group of studies created a measure by combining other measures of cognitive achievement (Castro & Rolleston, ; Foulkes & Mori, ). Thus, our results could not find significant differences, unlike other studies which did find them, probably due to the cognitive measure used.…”

“…Previous research suggested that some features of scarceness which are prevalent in rural contexts present special risk factors for cognitive development. For example, rural settings have a largely reduced access to preschool education (Castro & Rolleston, ; Gouin et al, ) and fewer years of parental education (Foulkes & Mori, ; Mykerezi, Kostandini, Jordan, & Melo, ; Tine, ). Rural contexts have been also characterized by low‐quality dwellings and low parental occupation (Chambers, ), factors that has been shown to affect normal cognitive development (Ngure et al, ).…”

Risks for Child Cognitive Development in Rural Contexts

“…5–48) examined the rural-urban gap in cognition, but only atone SES level (i.e., low-SES children). A third group of studies has identified effects of poverty and effects of context, but do not separate those effects (Foulkes et al, 2008, p. 129; Foulkes and Mori, 2009; Gouin et al, 2015). A fourth group of studies, go deeper in the associations among poverty, context and cognition, examining whether the form and magnitude of income’s relationship with early reading and math achievement differ across the urban-rural continuum (Miller and Votruba-Drzal, 2013, p. 234; Miller et al, 2013, p. 1452).…”

Understanding urbanicity: how interdisciplinary methods help to unravel the effects of the city on mental health

“…As flipside to reduced green space, the features of urban environments (e.g., noise, light, social encounters) may lead to cognitive overload for attention, memory or cognitive control (Bratman et al, 2012) and salience processing in general (Winton- Brown et al, 2014). Some evidence linked urbanicity to reduced cognitive development in children (Gouin et al, 2015).…”