TY - JOUR T1 - Stability of general cognition in children born extremely preterm as they grow older: good or bad news? JF - Archives of Disease in Childhood - Fetal and Neonatal Edition JO - Arch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed DO - 10.1136/archdischild-2017-313987 SP - fetalneonatal-2017-313987 AU - Lex W Doyle AU - Peter J Anderson Y1 - 2017/11/10 UR - http://fn.bmj.com/content/early/2017/11/09/archdischild-2017-313987.abstract N2 - Does the IQ of children born extremely preterm (EP; <28 weeks’ gestation) catch-up to their peers as they transition into adolescence and adulthood, or does the cognitive deficit observed in early childhood persist, or even worsen? Because few quality long-term longitudinal studies exist, the answer is unclear. In the current issue of the journal, Linsell and colleagues addressed this important question using data from the EPICure study,1 which assessed cognitive functioning at 2.5, 6, 11 and 19 years of age in survivors born <26 weeks’ gestational age in the UK and the Ireland over 10 months in 1995. Their major finding was that poor cognitive function in EP survivors persists throughout childhood into late adolescence/early adulthood. They also identified several variables associated with worse cognitive performance in the preterm group, including male sex, neonatal brain injury, gestational age <25 weeks and having a mother with a lower education level.The authors are to be commended for following their cohort for so long to provide contemporary data for the highest risk group of preterm survivors. One of the main challenges with long-term follow-up studies is maintaining high retention, and, as expected, the follow-up rates in this study tailed off as the cohort aged. A strength of the study was that they were able to compare results with term-born controls at 6, 11 and 19 years, but the follow-up rate in the control group was also low by 19 years of age. The problem with low follow-up rates is that the outcome for those who do not attend … ER -