Preterm Birth and Attention
Research type
Research Study
Full title
PATCH: Preterm Birth and Attention in Children
IRAS ID
129767
Contact name
Lucy Cragg
Contact email
Research summary
Children who were born very preterm (<32 weeks gestation) have a high risk of attention difficulties when they reach school age, and an increased risk of being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. These children are more likely to display behaviours consistent with inattention, such as daydreaming and being easily distracted, than the hyperactive and impulsive behaviours commonly associated with ADHD. It remains unclear precisely what the underlying deficits of these attentional problems are, although we think they may be related to how fast these children can process information and how well they can hold and manipulate information in their memory. It is also unclear whether the causes of attention difficulties are different in very preterm children to those in children who were born at their due date.
We will assess two groups of 80 children aged between 8-10 years. One group will be children who were born very preterm (<32 weeks gestation) and another group will be children who were born at term (37-42 weeks gestation). We plan to compare the groups at a behavioural level using parent-report questionnaires to investigate the types of attention-related behaviours the children display. We plan to compare the groups at a cognitive level by looking at the groups’ performance on a variety of neurocognitive measures that have been designed to tap into the processes we think may underlie inattentive behaviour. We also plan to collect and compare encephalographic measurements of the electrical activity produced by the brain which can tell us whether there are differences in the neural processing between the groups. Finally, we plan to investigate whether complications surrounding the birth of the children in the very preterm group can explain their scores on the other measures.
REC name
West Midlands - Coventry & Warwickshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/WM/0203
Date of REC Opinion
6 Jun 2013
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion