Cognitive and communicative-linguistic developmental trajectories of extremely preterm infants: a longitudinal study in the first year of life

The impact of an extremely low gestational age (ELGA) on development has been investigated mainly after two years of life, while early abilities of ELGA preterms have received less attention. We aimed to show how ELGA impacts cognitive and communicative-linguistic developmental outcomes and trajectories in the first year. Seventeen monolingual Italian ELGA preterms (mean GA 25,7 weeks) without major cerebral damage, and 11 monolingual Italian full-term (FT) infants, comparable for biological and social characteristics, were evaluated at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months (corrected age for preterms) by administering the Griffiths Mental Development Scales (GMDS), providing a general developmental quotient (DQ) and five sub-quotients (SQ) (locomotor, personal and social, hearing and language, eye and hand coordination, performance). The Italian long form of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI), evaluating communicative (gesture and actions) and lexical (word comprehension and word production) competences, was administered at 9 and 12 months to the parents. Findings showed that, compared to the FTs, the ELGAs exhibited significantly lower DQ and SQ scores in the GMDS and significantly lower gestures-actions and lexical comprehension scores in the MB-CDI. A few ELGAs resulted to have mild or moderate impairments according to the GMDS. Our findings highlight that early cognitive and communicative-linguistic abilities are impacted by ELGA with poorer developmental outcomes, evidence of impairment in some infants and different developmental trajectories with respect to FTs. The relevance of repeated assessments through both developmental scales and parental questionnaires was shown.