Highlights from this issue

Gestational age and educational outcome Associations between prematurity per se, and outcomes of various kinds, are subject to very high risks of confounding by unmeasured or unknown variables that are themselves causal of, or associated with, being born preterm. Searle et al report their findings w... Full description

Gestational age and educational outcome Associations between prematurity per se, and outcomes of various kinds, are subject to very high risks of confounding by unmeasured or unknown variables that are themselves causal of, or associated with, being born preterm. Searle et al report their findings when educational data on over 28000 school children in South Australia at the age of 8 were linked with routinely collected maternal and perinatal data: the effect of GA persisted after adjustment for a large number of potentially confounding variables, and remained constant among babies born preterm, term and even post-term with no J or U shaped relationship. Propranolol and retinopathy There is increasing interest in the possibility that propranolol might be effective as a prophylactic against retinopathy of prematurity, so the outcome of the trial reported by Sanghvi et al is in a sense disappointing: there was no clear advantage over placebo for 0.5 mg/kg given 12 hourly from postnatal day 7 until 37 weeks' post-menstrual age, though the direction of effect favoured propranolol.