A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the journal JAMA Network Open concludes that the Covid-19 pandemic did not alter the neurological development of babies born during quarantine.
Research shows that the neurodevelopment in the first year of life was not modified by being born or raised during the Covid-19 pandemic or by gestational exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
However, the authors appreciated that, regardless of whether there was maternal infection, the pandemic was associated with a risk of communication delay in these babies. Specifically, the data show that, at one year of age, children from the pandemic have a higher probability of communication problems, while those born to mothers who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy presented lower values in fine motor.
This article, conducted by a team from Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard University School of Medicine (USA), is a systematic review of 8 studies and a meta-analysis. In total, 21,419 infants were analyzed (11,438 examined in the pandemic and 9,981 in the pre-pandemic period).
Now, the authors write that although the observations raise potential concerns regarding the early developmental trajectory of children born during the Covid-19 pandemic, “long-term follow-up behavioral assessments would be needed to see if this is confirmed during early childhood».
At one year of age, children of the pandemic have a higher probability of communication problems
The main value of the study, they add, “lies in its importance to generate novel hypotheses that justify a deeper study.”
similar Lawrence Andrewco-director of the Cognition and Language Research Group of the Open University of Catalonia: “It will be very important to continue studying this cohort of children to assess whether they have a higher incidence of suffering from a developmental language disorder in childhood, the prevalence of which is fixed in 7.5%’.
“The main implication is that, at one year of age, children born in a pandemic do not present higher values of alterations in neurodevelopment compared to children born in previous years, except in the area of communication development.
Speaking to the Science Media Center, Andreu states that “in order to analyze the real impact on the neurodevelopment of children born in a pandemic, we will have to wait for the cohort of children born during the pandemic to become older in order to analyze whether the incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders is greater in these children, since the different neurodevelopmental disorders are detected during childhood (some, such as autism, are detected around two years of age; others, such as the developmental language disorder, around 5 years; and there are even others, such as learning disorders, which are diagnosed around 7-8 years old).