Every year, 60,000 premature babies are born in the UK, and more than 40% of them will struggle as children to make sense of touch, sound, and movement. This project aims to find out why. The problem is that doctors cannot currently predict which preterm infants will develop sensory processing disorders—conditions that make learning, coordination, and communication difficult. The brain circuits that filter and combine sensory information mature just before birth, so premature delivery and the intense stimuli of neonatal care may disrupt them. This project will map how healthy newborn brains process sensory information, then compare that to brain activity in preterm babies. Researchers will follow the children until they are 30 months old to see whether early brain patterns predict later sensory difficulties. If the research succeeds, it could allow clinicians to identify at-risk infants while their brains are still forming. Families could then adapt the child’s sensory environment—reducing overwhelming stimuli or providing the right kind of input—potentially preventing cascading developmental problems. The findings could also help policymakers allocate resources for early intervention, reducing long-term costs for education and care. This is fundamental science: understanding how the developing brain builds its sensory scaffolding, with the goal of catching problems before they become entrenched.
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About 60,000 infants are born prematurely each year in the UK. Their chances of survival have steadily increased in recent times thanks to better neonatal care, however, there is still not much improvement on their neurodevelopmental outcome. More than 40% of preterm children at school age will have difficulties in handling sensory information which will have a negative impact on their quality of life and make learning, coordination and communication a struggle. Prematurely born children may have exaggerated reactions to a mild stimulus or not respond at all to something painful and they may also have problems in coordinating their movements or balance on a bench. This is because the sensory information that reaches their brain does not get handled correctly. However, we do not know the mechanisms that lead to these issues, how to identify who will develop sensory problems and when to intervene. Preterm neonates are born during a critical phase of their brain development and are exposed to the external world ahead of time. Many of them can spend their first months of life in neonatal care, where they are exposed to different and more intense stimuli than those normally experienced in the womb. Their premature birth and this experience may affect the way their brain develops and interfere with the maturation of brain circuits that are responsible for processing the external environment. This very early disruption to sensory functions could have a cascading effect on how a child explore and experience their environment, which in turn will lead to the sensory and cognitive challenges suffered by this population. If we could recognise that there is something wrong with sensation and perception at birth, clinician and carers could intervene when the brain circuits are still forming and potentially put them on the right track. The families would also benefit from understanding how their children are developing and how they can support them to improve chances of a good outcome, for example by adapting the sensory environment to the child's functional needs. This would help reduce the emotional, psychological, physical and economic challenges of prematurely born children and their families in the long term. The overall aim of this project is to understand how sensory information is normally processed by the neonatal brain, how this is affected by premature birth and whether issues in these functions lead to later sensory processing and associated neurodevelopmental disorders. Senses are processed in a ladder-like hierarchy, with the bottom 'rungs' developing early in the womb, while higher rungs develop just before normal birth. Disruption to any of these steps will result in an aberrant perception of the environment and because they develop just before birth, they may be vulnerable to prematurity. We will map the development of the brain functions that allow an individual to filter out unnecessary information and to put together information coming from different senses, and to actively explore the environment. We will then assess whether these functions are more likely to be altered in preterm babies that spent their first weeks of life in hospital care. Finally, we will follow these babies up to 30 months of age when we will be able to test their development and sensory behaviour and see whether brain processing at birth can predict long-term outcomes. In summary, understanding the development of sensory processing in the neonatal brain will allow carers and families to provide early targeted and individualised interventions to infants at risk of sensory and associated neurodevelopmental disorders. Finally, the results will help policy makers in making decisions regarding funding for health services, considering that neurodevelopmental and cognitive disabilities are associated with high societal costs in terms of educational support and provision of care while the resources that communities can provide to them are limited.
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