Premature Babies with Brain Injury Can Improve

Researchers have discovered that premature babies with very low birth weights who have early learning and other mental problems improve to almost normal by the time they reach the age of eight. Their findings were reported in the February 12, 2003, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The investigators looked at 296 children who weighed 600-1,250 g at birth. They tested verbal comprehension and intelligence using standardized tests at intervals of 36, 54, 72, and 96 months of age. By the age of eight, the children had increased their comprehension by 11 points, from 88 to 99. The average score for normal-weight children of the same age is 100. The only children who did not show progress were those with brain bleeding at six hours combined with additional brain injury.

"These are among the first results to show that the brain may recover from injury over time,” said principal investigator Laura Ment, M.D., professor of pediatrics and neurology at Yale School of Medicine (New Haven, USA). Dr. Ment said the next step is to replicate the study and use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to analyze brain volume of these children and see if the brains of these children at eight are smaller than brains of normal birth-weight children.




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