WHILE advances in neonatal intensive care are allowing increasingly premature babies to survive, it is becoming clear how profoundly these children are affected by their start to life.
Just over 1 per cent of babies in Europe are born before 33 weeks and these are considered very premature. To find out how these children fare five years on, BĂ©atrice Larroque at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris and colleagues studied 1817 children who had been born at 22 to 32 weeks and compared them with 667 children born at full term. Nearly half of the very premature…
