Has anyone read this article about early births (including early births) and learning disabilities in a sensible newspaper?

[withorwithoutyou]

I can only find the mail's take on it and I wouldn't mind reading a grown up newspaper's version of the story.

Sorry, meant to say includng 39 weeks! Haven't slept much recently

The way I see it is this:

If you take 1000 babies born at 40 weeks, 47 of them will need special care/have special needs.

If you take 1000 babies born at 39 weeks, 44 of them will need special care/have special needs.

So 3 out of every 1000 babies may be affected by being born at 39 weeks versus 40 weeks.

In public health terms, this is significant (there being 600,000 babies born in the UK each year). In individual terms, it is not. Moreover, this study did not account for the fact that some babies are induced at 39 weeks to avoid other compromising situations (eg mother's high blood pressure; baby showing signs of needing to be better off out than in). This in itself could easily skew the stats, given they are only slightly different anyway. So the baby born at 39 weeks who needs special care is in special care because of in-utero events that caused the induction ie the 39 week thing is a result, not a cause, of other events.

DOH!

Swap my figs around - the lower figure is for 40 week birth.

its all number crunching, i had my due date changed 3 times!! this change had a 9 day difference.

my little guy came by section in the end cos he was breech, 3 days earlier than the last date given. my cycle was every 27 days, so surely they cud work out the date.

we will have to wait for others to try to make sense of this data too.

good luck to them, its hard to try to make sense of the world

Of course you are right about dates being innaccurate, MintHumbug. With the massive sample they used, though, one can probably safely assume that the dates were equally out both ways ie as many babies' dates were recorded wrongly as 'early' as 'late' when their mothers' cycles were taken into account.

This is one of the reasons why anything from 38-42 weeks is usually regarded for practical purposes as 'term', though the tendency over the years has been for anything over 40 weeks to be 'term +' which it isn't, really.

Thanks tiktok

Sorry to hear that avril

Thanks for the link, that's exactly what I was looking for.