This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Helen Harrison
Berkeley, Calif

JAMA. 1996;276(21):1722.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—In their study of the self-perceived quality of life of extremely low-birth-weight (ELBW) adolescents, Dr Saigal and colleagues¹ urge that "a great deal of caution be exercised" regarding possible clinical application of the high quality-of-life scores reported by the prematurely born teenagers. As the parent of a young adult with disabilities and as a medical writer familiar with the Canadian ELBW cohort, I would like to underscore this point. Caution is warranted because the 150 ELBW teenagers (compared with a control group of 124 term-born teenagers) have significantly underreported documented disabilities.

At age 8 years, the ELBW and control children were evaluated by clinicians using a health status classification system.^2,3 By clinical evaluation, 21% of the ELBW children had impaired mobility.^2,3 However, only 10% of the ELBW teenagers, using the same health status classification system, reported mobility problems.¹ At age 8 years, 1 . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?