Research suggests early term babies 37/38 weeks have a lower IQ and more health problems?

[greekyogurtaddict]

So, my newest arrival has turned up unexpectedly early at 38+3. She has been deemed to be a completley healthy early term baby, so off I go to google 'early term'. My other babies were full term so I'm really surprised she came a little early and I wonder if it could be stress related as I was moving house and doing far too much in the heat. I am now regretting not taking it easier if it could have consequences for her. I have found alarming research that cautions against early inductions etc due to early term babies being 5% less likely to be gifted and generally having lower iqs and slower development curves due to less grey matter. They exhibit more SEN, adhd and other chronic health issues. I think I'm looking for reassurance that these effects are tiny and on an individual rather than population level most people's early term children babies will grow up to be indistinguishable from the full term ones or is there possibly something to it?

I'm not an expert but am surprised to read this. Yes, premature birth is associated with a higher risk for certain things you've named, though it's not a given, it's just the risk is higher in that demographic as they haven't had as much time to develop in utero. But I also thought 37 weeks was term so not sure how 38w+ is early term, though happy to be corrected x

That's what I thought until reading lots of research, some of which is summarised here:
www.nichd.nih.gov/newsroom/news/042120-developmental-delay

I had a quick read of the journal article that press release is based on (not a medical researcher, but in another area of scientific research). Yes, they are talking about population-level effects, and most 37, 38, and 39 week babies will be indistinguishable from most 40 and 41 week ones – and given any two individual children, it could well be the 38 week one who is brighter/sportier/whatever than the 40 week one. The authors themselves talk about the results in the context of routine (not for any medical reason) induction being offered at 39 weeks (which is not something I think is generally considered in the UK anyway, but apparently can be in the US). So they aren't suggesting we need to worry about babies who naturally come at 37, 38, 39 weeks, or that guidance for offering induction due to medical need should change – it's more of a 'all else being equal, maybe if baby doesn't come on his/her own at 39 weeks, you should leave them cooking a little longer...'.

Even at the population level, the study lumps quite a lot together. They looked at the development of the children 7 times between 4 months and 3 years (using the same questionnaires most health visitors use here) and counting up any 'fail' in any category at any age. A child only has to be 'in the black' once at one age to count, even if they went on to be on track in that category in later checks. There's nothing in the main paper about how the rate of fails changes, or doesn't change with age, and to me that's very important – if early term babies are more likely to 'fail' at 4 months, but have similar rates at 3 years, that's quite a different story than if the rates remain different at 3 years. (I would guess they didn't report this because they don't have enough data to draw robust conclusions without lumping all the data together, but that's inference on my part, they don't say anything about it.)

They do also look at gestations of children who were actually deemed eligible for early intervention, but there the results are a lot less robust. They can confidently say the risks are higher for children born before 37 weeks (which is obviously not news). From 37-41 weeks, there's potentially a slightly correlation between later birth and less risk of needing extra support, but the statistics show it's not robust, i.e., it could just be a random sampling effect.

Sorry, that's quite an essay – I hope it's a helpful one.