The reduction of infant mortality in recent years is the result of various factors ranging from improved prenatal care to improvements in the neonatal and intensive care units of many hospitals. Neonatology has become a field of advanced medicine which allows infants with very low birth weight and, many medical problems, who would have died fifteen years ago, to survive today.
Birth weight seems to be widely accepted as a generally valid index of prematurity.
A review of the literature indicates that infants weighing 5 lbs. Infants whose birth weight was as low as 1 lb. 8 ounces, born after 24 weeks of gestation, have survived in neonatal intensive care units. This is not to say that these infants have not had major problems including bleeding in the brain, severe respiratory difficulties, dependency on oxygen and injections. In a recent article published in the LIDA newsletter, Newsbriefs, it was reported that Canadian and American researchers studying extremely low birth weight children from age 7-years to the teen years documented lower C's and poorer reading and math skills in the low birth weight group than was found 11,1 their peers. According to studies presented at a pediatric research meeting, children whose birth weight was less than 2 lbs.