Corrected Age: One of The Areas Where Even The Pro's Get It Wrong
How does corrected age work and how do I use it to track my baby's development? OK, let's start at the very beginning. Premature babies have 2 ages
Normally yes. But even professionals sometimes get it wrong when working with babies born prematurely. Generally you just count the number of months, weeks and days from your baby’s date of birth to determine his age. But the age of premature babies work a little differently. In fact, preemie babies have 2 ages…
Your baby's calendar ageCalendar age is your child’s age calculated on his date of birth. As far as everyone is concerned, your baby only has this one age. That is the age that goes onto every imaginable form and paperwork during his lifetime.
But before we go to the second age, let’s first look at what qualifies as a premature baby. What is a premature baby?Full term pregnancy is accepted to be 40 weeks from the mother’s last menstrual period. So, all babies have a normal 40-week development period before birth. And any baby born before 37 full development weeks is seen as a premature baby. What this simply means is that if 2 babies are born on the same day, but did not have the same development period in the womb, their developments would not be the same. In fact, not even closely similar.
At this stage you will agree with me that as long as you keep on comparing Sam and Joe’s development, Sam will in all probability always be behind… at least for the first two years. Calculating the second ageOne way of realistically determining how well Sam is developing is to use Corrected Age (CA). Quite often this is also known as Gestationally Corrected Age (GCA) or sometimes just Gestational Age (GA). All these terms are based on the age the premature baby would be if the pregnancy had been 40 weeks. It is a calculated age to compensate for a premature baby’s shorter development period in the womb. (weeks or months) = calendar age (weeks or months) – period prematurely born (weeks or months) If we now look at Sam, his corrected age on 1 June he is = 6 months (on 1 June) – 1.5 months (born 6 weeks prematurely) = 4.5 months Using Sam’s CA immediately means that you don’t expect Sam to do the same things that Joe can already do. The fact that Sam is not sitting on 1 June is therefore not yet a concern. One caveat about using CA… It only works for babies born before 37 weeks. It does not apply to babies born close to the 40 week full term development period. Once you know how to calculate your premature baby’s CA, I suggest you do the following:
Only now decide how to proceed...
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