The recent findings presented at Neuroscience 2015, the annual scientific meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago this week, have shown that premature babies are at a higher risk for neurological and psychiatric problems.

In a press release, study author Dr. Cynthia Rogers, a child psychiatrist at Washington University of St. Louis, said the brain is mainly 'plastic' very early in life and potentially may be modified due to early intervention.

Dr. Cynthia Rogers mentioned that they generally can't start interventions until the development of after symptoms. Rogers added, “But what we're trying is to develop objective measures of brain development in preemies that can indicate whether a child is likely to have later problems so that we can then intervene with extra support and therapy early to improve outcomes”.

During the recent study, researchers looked at the connections in brains of premature babies that are associated with problems in communication, attention and processing emotions.

For doing a comparison between 58 babies born at full term and 76 infants born at a minimum of 10 weeks early, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor brain imaging. They scanned the full-term infants on their second or third day after birth whereas they scanned the premature babies within a few days of their due date.

Researchers found that brain networks in infants that were associated with attention, communication, and emotion were weaker than counterparts.

Rogers concluded they have discovered major differences between the white matter tracts and abnormalities in brain circuits in the infants born prematurely and the infants born at full term.