Intelligence and executive function of school-age preterm children in function of birth weight and perinatal complication.

Aim: Assessment of intelligence and executive function in 9-10-year-old preterm children as compared to a full-term comparison group and to reveal the background of the individual differences in the outcomes by analyzing the effects of perinatal and social-economic factors.

Method: Seventy-two preterm children (divided into two groups: 32 extremely low birth weight, 40 very low birth weight) and a matched group of 33 healthy full-term children, aged 9-10 years, were tested using the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children (WISC-IV) and digital versions of tasks measuring executive function. As background information perinatal variables and maternal education were entered in the analysis.

[Follow-up study of extremely low birth weight preterm infants to preschool age in the light of perinatal complications].

Introduction: Owing to the rapid progress of the medical science and technology, the chances of survival of the extremely low birth weight (<1000 g) preterm babies have dramatically improved. Nevertheless, the research findings on their long-term developmental outcome are inconsistent.

Aim: Our study has attempted to contribute to the understanding of the developmental mechanisms in the extremely low birth weight preterm infants and to the prediction of the developmental outcomes taking into account of the risk factors of development.

Mental State Understanding in Children with Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum.

Impaired social functioning is a well-known outcome of individuals with agenesis of the corpus callosum. Social deficits in nonliteral language comprehension, humor, social reasoning, and recognition of facial expression have all been documented in adults with agenesis of the corpus callosum. In the present study, we examined the emotional and mentalizing deficits that contributing to the social-cognitive development in children with isolated corpus callosum agenesia, including emotion recognition, theory of mind, executive function, working memory, and behavioral impairments as assessed by the parents.

[Behavioral and cognitive profile of corpus callosum agenesia - Review].

Background And Purpose: Agenesis of corpus callosum is a relatively frequent congenital cerebral malformation including dysplasia, total or partial absence of corpus callosum. The agenesis of corpus callosum can be occured in isolated form without accompanying somatic or central nervous system abnormalities and it can be associated with other central nervus system malformations. The behavioral and cognitive outcome is more favorable for patients with isolated agenesis of corpus callous than syndromic form of corpus callosum.

Effect of maturation on suprasegmental speech processing in full- and preterm infants: a mismatch negativity study.

Infants born prematurely are at higher risk for later linguistic deficits present in delayed or atypical processing of phonetic and prosodic information. In order to be able to specify the nature of this atypical development, it is important to investigate the role of early experience in language perception. According to the concept of Gonzalez-Gomez and Nazzi (2012) there is a special intrauterine sensitivity to the prosodic features of languages that should have a special role in language acquisition.

Can neurophysiological assessment improve timing of intervention in posthaemorrhagic ventricular dilatation?

Objective: Intraventricular haemorrhage is still the most common cause of brain lesion in preterm infants and development of a posthaemorrhagic ventricular dilatation (PHVD) can lead to additional neurological sequelae. Flash visual evoked potentials (fVEP) and amplitude-integrated electroencephalography (aEEG) are non-invasive neurophysiological monitoring tools. The aim of the study was to evaluate fVEPs and aEEGs in preterm infants with progressive PHVD prior to and after neurosurgical intervention for cerebrospinal fluid removal and to correlate the findings with severity of ventricular dilatation.

Newborn infants process pitch intervals.

Objective: We investigated whether the auditory system of newborn babies extracts the constancy of a pitch interval from exemplars varying in absolute pitch.

Methods: Event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded from healthy newborn infants in an oddball paradigm consisting of frequent standard and infrequent deviant tone pairs. Tone pairs varied in absolute frequency.

Auditory temporal grouping in newborn infants.

Adults normally perceive auditory scenes in terms of sound patterns emitted by concurrently active sources. Thus pattern formation is an important process of auditory object perception. The aim of the present study was to determine whether neonates group sounds by repeating pitch patterns.

Associated malformations in congenital diaphragmatic hernia cases in the last 15 years in a tertiary referral institute.

This is a review of cases of perinatally diagnosed congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) with associated malformations with regard to time of diagnosis, side of hernia, associated malformations, and outcome. The authors analyzed the data of CDH cases with associated malformations from records of the I. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Semmelweis University Faculty of Medicine, Budapest, between July 1, 1990 and June 30, 2005.