The Relation between Low Birth Weight in Preterm Children and Their Attentional Abilities

M. Dolores Roldán‐Tapia ； Julio Ramos‐Lizana ； M. Mar Sánchez‐Joya ； Rosa Cánovas ； Judit Bembibre‐Serrano

《International Journal of Advances in Psychology》 2卷1期 (2013/02) Pp. 61-68

並列摘要

Recent studies have shown that the preterm children present several neuropsychological deficits of varying severity (e.g. in visuospatial abilities, working memory, executive functioning etc and a reduced academic performance. These findings seem growing with decreasing of the gestational age (e.g. before the 32^nd week of pregnancy) and/or the birth weight (e.g.≦2400‐1500g). However birth weight has been revealed as the parameter more useful as a putative index of the Central Nervous System immaturity. The main objective of this study was to characterize the attentional abilities in a sample 7‐years‐old prematurely born children with a birth weight minor than 2400 g (N=51) in a comparison with a matched control group (N=46) of term children. With this aim, an adaptation of the Sohlberg and Mateer's attention model including its five components: focused, sustained, selective, alternating and divided attention was used. The preterm group performed significantly worse than the control group in all evaluated attentional processes; and the birth weight showed an inversely proportional significant effect with respect to this neuropsychological test. In conclusion, the attentional model proposed to assess this domain in preterm children has shown this efficiency to detect a generalized attentional deficit, even in tasks requiring the more basic components. These findings may account for some aspects of the cortical development and early brain organization.

並列關鍵字

Preterm Birth ； Birth Weight ； Attention ； Infant Neuropsychology