While it’s known that exposure to hypoglycemia alters the shape of the early developmental course, there has been a significant gap in our understanding of how hypoglycemia can alter a child’s development after early childhood. The team’s new study examined the long-term consequences of a child’s brain development in mid-childhood-nine to 10 years old-and found that there was no significant difference in academic outcomes for children exposed to hypoglycemia as newborns, as compared to their peers.
“Rich pre-school and school experiences may help a child’s brain to re-organize and improve their academic abilities up to the developmental milestones of their peers,” said Ben Thompson, a professor from the School of Optometry & Vision Science at Waterloo, CEO of the Centre for Eye and Vision Research in Hong Kong, and part of the team working on the groundbreaking research.
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Following 480 children born at risk of neonatal hypoglycemia, researchers assessed each child at aged nine to 10 in five key areas: academic achievement, executive function, visual-motor function, psychosocial adaptation, and general health. All child participants were involved in previous studies, providing researchers with information on their neuro-development outcomes at two and 4.5 years old.
The research team says that this catch-up in neuro-cognitive function could be because of brain-plasticity—the brain’s ability to adapt, change and mature as a result of experience.
“It’s a big relief to know that babies who are born with and treated for a condition as common as hypoglycemia are not likely to suffer long-term brain damage,” Thompson said.
Over the past decade, the research team has continued studying the efficacy of dextrose gel to treat low blood sugar in the first 48-hours of a newborn’s life, avoiding the need for babies to go to newborn intensive care units immediately after delivery. Dextrose is a sugar that comes from corn or wheat that is chemically identical to blood sugar.
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In an additional study published in the Journal for the American Medical Association, the team assesses the later risks of dextrose gel as a treatment for hypoglycemia in infancy, and found it caused no significant difference to the risk of neuro-sensory impairment at age two. This treatment continues to be widely used outside of New Zealand in a growing number of countries, including Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The studies, Association of neonatal hypoglycemia with academic performance in mid-childhood and Prophylactic oral dextrose gel and neurosensory impairment at 2-year follow-up of participants in the hPOD randomized trial, were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this month.
Source: Eurekalert
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