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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> The report is published in the April 21 online edition of The Lancet.
For the study, a research team led by Dr. David Odd, from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Southmead Hospital in Bristol collected data on children who participated in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children.
The researchers looked at children who were resuscitated at birth but had no symptoms of encephalopathy, which is any disease of the brain that changes brain function or structure. Among these children, 815 had no further neonatal care, and 58 had care for encephalopathy. They compared these children with 10,609 children who did not need to be resuscitated at birth, had no symptoms of encephalopathy, and received no neonatal care.
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To assess brain function, Odd's group measured IQ when the children were an average of 8.6 years old. A score of less than 80 was considered a low IQ.
The researchers found that children who had to be resuscitated, but did not have symptoms of encephalopathy, had a 65 percent increased risk of having a low IQ. Children who had to be resuscitated and had symptoms of encephalopathy had more than a sixfold risk of having a low IQ.
Since there are many more children who did not have symptoms of encephalopathy after being resuscitated, they have a greater effect on society, Odd's team noted.
"Infants who needed resuscitation, even if they did not develop encephalopathy in the neonatal period, had a substantially increased risk of a low full-scale IQ score...The data suggest that mild perinatal physiological compromise might be sufficient to cause subtle neuronal or synaptic damage, and thereby affect cognition in childhood and potentially in adulthood," the authors concluded.
Hack noted that improved prenatal care has reduced the number of infants who need to be resuscitated. "Modern care does prevent as much as possible," she said.
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