Journal article
The relation between cesarean birth and child cognitive development
C Polidano, A Zhu, JC Bornstein
Scientific Reports | NATURE PORTFOLIO | Published : 2017
Abstract
This is the first detailed study of the relation between cesarean birth and child cognitive development. We measure differences in child cognitive performance at 4 to 9 years of age between cesarean-born and vaginally-born children (n = 3,666) participating in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). LSAC is a nationally representative birth cohort surveyed biennially. Using multivariate regression, we control for a large range of confounders related to perinatal risk factors and the socio-economic advantage associated with cesarean-born children. Across several measures, we find that cesarean-born children perform significantly below vaginally-born children, by up to a tenth of..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (project number CE140100027). The Centre is administered by the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland, with nodes at The University of Western Australia, The University of Melbourne and The University of Sydney. This study uses data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children (LSAC), a nationally representative longitudinal cohort survey conducted jointly by the Department of Social Services (DSS), the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Ethics approval for the data collection was obtained from the AIFS Ethics Committee by the above listed government agencies. No ethics approval was required to use the data for the purposes of this study because the data contains no identifying information. The data is available upon request from AIFS (http://growingupinaustralia.gov.au/). The findings and views reported in this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the ARC, DSS, AIFS or the ABS. The paper benefited from the helpful comments of: Kirsten Hancock, Tony Hannan, Bobbi Wolfe, Chris Ryan, Nicolas Salamanca, Yi-Ping Tseng, Kevin Schnepel, Dan Christensen and the attendees of the Melbourne Institute Brown-bag seminar. All opinions and any mistakes are our own. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.