What did we find?
Firstly we looked at disability. Half of the population had none and roughly a quarter each had severe disability and other disabilities respectively. This is summarised in the first diagram over the page.
The 64 Children with severe disabilities had in the main cerebral palsy or other neurological problems or developmental delay, though a small number have problems in several areas.
It is difficult to be certain how these disabilities will affect children as they grow up and this is one of the reasons we need to study the children again.
We also found that development was slightly behind for the whole group with an average score of about 85% for both their motor and learning skills. Within the study children, being 23 weeks was not worse than being 25 weeks for disability or development, but survival was much worse at 23 weeks compared to 24 weeks and 25 weeks as we would have expected.
The EPICure children were also more likely to be left handed or “not right handed” than children of the same age. This is something we need to understand and we are working on the information we have to see if we can explain some of the reasons why.
Children in the EPICure group tend to be smaller and lighter than full term children in early childhood, although most measurements fall in the normal range. For example, average weight is about 3 pounds less than the average for the population. Very few studies have looked at growth in later childhood, but there is a tendency to slowly catch up in other groups of premature children.
The commonest medical problems related to the chest. About 45% of children needed help with medicine to relieve wheeze and cough, and many of these children were said to have asthma. Around 40% of children had needed readmission to hospital after discharge, again mainly for chest problems. These sort of problems were commoner if children had needed oxygen for a long time after birth.
We are still analysing the behaviour data you sent in and we will put the information on the website when we have it (see below).
Finally and importantly, we can put all the survival and disability together to provide information which can be used to inform doctors, midwives and parents about the chances of survival for the whole group:
We have also looked at which babies are most likely to survive without disability – being a girl, getting steroid injections before birth and having a normal newborn brain scan were associated with lower risks. Read More>