By Megan Rauscher
"Prematurity alone is associated with persistent reduction in lung function and may contribute to increased risk of recurrent respiratory illnesses early in life," Dr. Marcus H. Jones, from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, told Reuters Health.
In a previous study of healthy two-month-old infants who were born prematurely, Jones and colleagues found that these infants had normal forced vital capacity, a standard measure of lung function, but decreased forced expiratory flow, which is the amount of air dispelled from the lungs during a certain time.
"If these preterm infants are to exhibit catch-up growth and normalise lung function by school age, we hypothesised that this would occur in the first year of life, when the lung undergoes rapid growth," Jones noted.
To investigate, he and his colleagues compared the rate of lung growth in the 26 preterm infants from the previous study and 24 full term infants by measuring lung performance in the first and second year of life.
They found that lung capacity and development relative to body size was similar between the two groups, but airway function was consistently lower in the premature infants at both evaluations.
"Interestingly, we have found no difference in the rate of increase of lung function between the two groups, ie, we didn't detect a catch-up in the preterm group when measured in the second year of life," Jones told Reuters Health.
Persistently reduced airflow in the presence of normal lung function and the absence of catch-up growth in airway function "suggests that premature birth is associated with altered lung development," Jones said.