Long-term Follow-up of Preoperative Infant Event-related Potentials in School-age Children with Craniosynostosis.

Background: Previous studies demonstrated impaired auditory processing in children with sagittal and metopic craniosynostosis before surgical correction. This study investigated whether worse presurgical neural response as assessed by event-related potentials (ERP) was predictive of poorer school-age neurocognition.

Methods: Preoperative infant ERP was recorded in 15 sagittal and 18 metopic patients. Mismatch negativity and P150 paradigms were derived from ERP recordings, as previously published. Of those, 13 sagittal and 13 metopic patients returned for neurocognitive evaluation 6 or more years later. ERP was correlated to neurocognitive outcomes using Spearman's correlations controlling for age. Two-tailed t-tests were used to evaluate the influence of age at the time of surgery (6 months) and morphologic severity on neurocognitive outcomes.

Results: In the sagittal group, no significant correlations were found between preoperative mismatch negativity or P150 amplitudes and neurocognitive outcomes. Although no correlation was found between mismatch negativity and neurocognitive outcome in the metopic group, those with lower P150 amplitudes had higher scores in performance IQ (r = -0.877, P < 0.001) and full-scale IQ (r = -0.893, < 0.001). Morphologic severity and neurocognitive outcomes showed no relationship in the sagittal or metopic groups. Patients who received surgery at less than 6 months had higher full-scale IQ (109.69 versus 95.92, = 0.025), visuomotor integration (103.15 versus 90.46, = 0.041), and visual perception scores (105.69 versus 96.08, = 0.033).

Conclusions: Preoperative infant ERP does not correlate with school-age neurocognitive outcomes. Earlier age at the time of surgery was associated with improved neurocognitive outcomes.