Three in ten extremely preterm children have motor difficulties at 12 — and few are getting help

The edition in brief

In the national Extremely Preterm Infants in Sweden Study, 30% of 268 children born before 27 weeks, without cerebral palsy or severe impairment, had significant motor difficulties at 12, against 3% of term-born peers (adjusted OR 17.0). Boys and those born earliest were at highest risk, autism and ADHD were common alongside, and only 9.5% had received physiotherapy in the past year. An umbrella review of 23 meta-analyses covering 2.8 million children found screen use associated with lower academic achievement (r −0.15) and language skills (r −0.14), and more internalising and externalising behaviour (r about 0.10), but not with executive function or maths, science or reading scores; these are small, observational associations. In a French trial of 103 infants with bronchiolitis, automated closed-loop oxygen kept infants in the target saturation range more of the time (89.4% vs 74.9%) with lower flows, but did not shorten hospital stay; the trial recruited fewer infants than planned.