Children whose birth weight is below the 25th percentile are more likely to encounter difficulties in acquiring, assimilating or using various skills.
- An infant is considered average when they are at the 50th percentile.
- Babies born above the 75th percentile did not have an increased risk of developmental problems.
“There are few data on the association between birth weight and development in children born from 37 weeks of gestation”, wrote British researchers in a study published in the journal Plos Medicine.
Cognitive development: more than 600,000 infants followed
In this work, they analyzed the development of more than 686,284 infants born in Scotland after 37 weeks of pregnancy.
Around the age of two or three, the children took part in an assessment, which looked at their social development and their fine motor, gross motor and communication skills. During their research, the scientists also took into account complicating factors, such as the sex of the child and the age of the mother at the time of delivery, as well as her state of health and socio-economic status. economic.
Low birth weight is associated with developmental disabilities
According to the results, babies whose weight was below the 25th percentile at birth had a higher risk of developmental disabilities than infants born between the 25th and 75th percentiles. As a reminder, the percentile makes it possible to determine the weight and the height of the baby compared to the whole of the population of the same age and the same sex. For example, if the height of the newborn is at the 25th percentile, this means that 25% of the children in the population are the same height as him or smaller, and that 75% are taller.
“About 2.5% of problems with social skills and 3% of problems with fine motor development were attributable to birth weight between the 10th and 24th percentile,” can we read in the study. According to the authors, low birth weight is an unrecognized and potentially important factor in the prevalence of problems related to child development. “Better birth weight monitoring, parenting counseling and increased support during childhood may help reduce risk in low birth weight babies,” concluded the researchers.