Preemie Babies Born in Poverty Less Likely to be Ready for School
Posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 and is filed under Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Preemie babies born into poverty are four times less likely to be ready for school, study shows.
Neonatal care has enabled preemie babies with respiratory problems to be ready for school, but studies show that those born into poverty, and are of male gender, are less likely to be ready, reveals a study from the University of Chicago Medical Center report.
“The good news is premature babies are surviving. Neonatology has done a remarkable job in lowering mortality without increasing morbidity,” said study co-author Jeremy Marks, MD, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics. “The bad news is poverty leads to huge disparities in school readiness, with poor kids faring four times worse than others.”

“We will continue to search for new and better therapies to improve the care of babies born prematurely,” said Michael Schreiber, MD, professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago and the study’s lead author. “However, society must provide the additional long-term resources these vulnerable children require if they are to ever reap the full benefits of our medical advances.”
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