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Researchers link low birth weight to lower achievement CHICAGO, (AFP) - Babies with a low birth weight are less likely to perform as well as their peers of normal birth weight in the future either professionally or academically, according to a study released Tuesday. Researchers at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey reported that babies who weighed 5.5 pounds (2.5 kilograms) at birth, which is considered as small for gestational age (SGA), had increased "academic difficulties" and "deficits in professional and economic attainment." "Many of the SGA children do well, but as a group, these kids are at risk," said Richard Strauss, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Medical School at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. The team found that they demonstrated "small but significant deficits in academic achievement" at five, 10 and 16 years of age. At age 16, teachers were unlikely to rate this group in the top 15 percent of their class compared to their peers who weighed in at a healthy 9.1 pounds (4.12 kilograms). They were also more than twice as likely to recommend special education for this group compared to students of so-called normal birth weight. As adults, while the low-birth weight group did not seem to have been disadvantaged in terms of quality of life, they were lower on the career ladder and had lower incomes than their peers. In spite of few differences between the two groups in years of education; employment; hours of work per week; marital status or satisfaction with life, SGA adults had only a nine percent chance of having a professional or managerial job compared to 16 percent for their peers. "Although their quality of life seems to be normal, this study shows mild but significant degrees of functional impairment," said Strauss who was unwilling to speculate on the reasons why. But he urged that "every effort should be made in early and middle childhood to provide children who were SGA with an enriched environment to minimize the long-term negative effects."
The study, which is published in this week's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, was based on the records of 14,000 British infants -- more than 1,000 of who had a low birth weight
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