A new perspective: Establishing developmental profiles of premature infants based on Bayley-III scores at age 2

Abstract

Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies in early childhood generally focus on different developmental areas separately. The aim of this study is to identify the most common developmental profiles regarding cognitive, language and motor skills among low birthweight (LBW) children. Our sample included 208 LBW children examined at 24–28 months. We used cluster analysis to identify developmental profiles based on the scores of the Bayley-III Cognitive, Language and Motor scales. We found three consistent profiles (High, Mildly Delayed and Severely Delayed) and three inconsistent, average profiles (with High Expressive Language, with Mildly Delayed Expressive Language and with Severely Delayed Language). Socioeconomic status, maternal education, in vitro fertilization, plurality and chronic morbidities were significantly related to the clusters. Cluster analysis might be an effective method to identify developmental profiles of preterm (and other at-risk) children, which might result in a more complex understanding of cognitive and psychomotor development in early childhood.

Keywords:

• Cluster analysis
• developmental profiles
• language development
• low birthweight premature infants
• psychomotor development

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the children and parents for their participation and interest in this study. We are grateful to our colleagues in the DE KK Pediatric Clinic and the Department of Neonatology for their contribution in data collection and assistance in pre-processing self-report data. We would like to thank János Nagy for his help in statistical analysis.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Ethical concerns

Our research was approved by the Hungarian Medical Research Council (33176-2/2017/EKU) following the ethical principles of WMA Declaration of Helsinki. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Authors’ contributions

FK prepared data for analyses, performed the statistical analyses and drafted the manuscript; BEN participated in the design and coordination of the study and helped interpreting results and drafting the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.