Page 49 - Sample Moderate prematurity, socioeconomic status, and neurodevelopment in early childhood

Effects of SES on behavioural and emotional problems
differences in background characteristics. To prevent over-adjustment for factors that highly correlated with SES, we did not adjust for family composition and mothers’ ethnicity. Finally, we conducted stratified analyses by gender because in previous work girls appeared to be more vulnerable than boys for the effects of MP birth.3 Statistical analyses were performed in SPSS for Windows v. 20.0 (Chicago, Illinois).
RESULTS
In Table 1 we present characteristics of the study participants according to SES. In
our sample of 915 MP and 543 term-born children, the rate of MP birth was 71.8%
in children with low SES, 61.7% in children with intermediate SES, and 57.6% in
children with high SES. The background characteristics that differed significantly
between SES categories were family composition, number of siblings, age of 4 mother, and ethnicity of mother. Children with low family SES were more likely to
be part of a one-parent family, to have many siblings, to have a young mother (< 25 years of age), and to have a non-European mother. Non-participating children differed from participating children regarding some characteristics shown in Table 1. Low SES was more common among non-participating children (educational level and non-Dutch ethnicity both P < .001). Gender and SGA did not differ significantly between participating and non-participating children.
Table 2 shows the prevalence rates of clinically relevant CBCL scores in MP and term-born children. In all three SES categories, prevalence rates were highest in MP children. Furthermore, the prevalence of behavioural and emotional problems increased markedly with decreasing SES. Regarding total problems, prevalence rates in MP children increased from 5.1% (high SES) to 7.5% (intermediate SES) and 11.3% (low SES). MP children with low SES had significantly higher total problem scores than those with high SES (P=0.013).
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