Preterm Infant Pain Exposure and Neurodevelopmental Outcomes

A cohort of 196 infants born at 28 to 32 weeks' gestation was followed from birth to 2 years corrected age. The dataset contains composite pain scores from the first 28 days of life and neurodevelopmental assessments from the NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale, Bayley-III, and BITSEA. It supports analysis of associations between early-life stress and neurodevelopment, with variables for race, sex, and mother's own milk intake.

Use Cases

• Modeling associations between composite pain scores and neurobehavioral scale outcomes.
• Investigating racial disparities in pain exposure and developmental outcomes.
• Analyzing the protective role of mother's own milk intake on early stress.
• Examining sex differences in motor score development following painful exposures.
• Longitudinal tracking of cognitive, language, and motor scores from infancy to age two.

Strengths

• Contains longitudinal data from a cohort of 196 preterm infants followed for two years.
• Uses standardized clinical assessments (Neonatal Infant Stressor Scale, Bayley-III, BITSEA).
• Published under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license, allowing reuse with attribution.

Limitations

• Column names and exact row count are not specified in the provided metadata.
• The dataset appears to be a single document file (DOCX), which may limit machine-readability compared to structured formats.
• Geographic origin of the cohort is not stated.

Provenance

Source

Tingting Zhao

Collection Method

Clinical cohort study with data collected from infant assessments.

Time Range

From birth to 2 years corrected age for each infant.

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-05-13.