The brain, interrupted – Lasting consequences of premature birth

I was born two months early, via c-section, in early 1980s. There was concern I wasn't going to make it the first month or so post. I don't know exactly why they felt they had to perform the c-section so early, but I recall that my mother was given something to try to accelerate the development of my lungs.

Seems to have worked out fine, I've always been able to hold my breath for an abnormal amount of time compared to my peers, and my cardio / endurance abilities as a child were at the top of my peers.

> Scientists suspect that when the brain is forced to carry out a crucial part of its development while the child is in the outside world instead of a warm, watery womb, it receives inappropriate signals from the environment that affect how its neurons are linked into networks. “The premature brain gets subjected to quite different sensory inputs — like visual stimulation and gravity effects — which it is not supposed to be subject to,” says Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Paris, who studies language development in infants. “They can be sudden, intense but also unpredictable.” Some of these unnatural sensory signals are inevitably provided by the intensive medical procedures that keep premature babies alive.

I recall a (I think) Russian experiment with faked weightlessness for their space programme where they had people lie on half-filled water beds for a month. It was really effective.

If we made an incubator with one of those, and made it a 37 degree heat bath while we're at it, wouldn't that compensate for some of these stimuli?

Perhaps we should be investing more effort in predicting and preventing premature births. When it already happened it doesn't look readily fixable.

As a father of an premature born child I find this topic very interresting. Do you have an idea where to look for more info on cognitive deficits of prematurely born children?