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- Neil Marlow (United Kingdom)
PREDICTING EARLY BRAIN FUNCTION IN HIGH-RISK CHILDREN AND WHY IT MATTERS
- Deirdre M. Murray (Ireland)
SOCIOECONOMIC DEPRIVATION AND THE PRETERM INFANT: HOW DOES IT AFFECT OUTCOME?
- James P. Boardman (United Kingdom)
Abstract
Abstract Body
Social gradients are powerful determinants of cognitive and socio-emotional development in the general population but their importance for shaping development after preterm birth (PTB) is less certain because PTB itself is associated with atypical brain development, and social factors are seldom considered as explanatory variables in their own right in this population.
Professor Boardman will discuss evidence from multiple data sources - neuroimaging, record-linkage of epidemiological data, eye-tracking, and responses to the Still-Face Paradigm - which indicate that socioeconomic status is associated with atypical brain development and injury, social cognition, emotion regulation, and language abilities of preterm children, respectively. He will consider the biological pathways that could embed social factors in brain development.
These observations indicate that socioeconomic status is an important determinant of outcome across the whole gestational age range, and they challenge the paradigm that prematurity outweighs non-medical determinants of health in preterm children. Policies that reduce childhood deprivation could lead to improved pre-school outcomes and potentially avoid the propagation of disadvantage across the life course, including for children born preterm.