It highlights relatively inexpensive interventions that can be integrated into their pathway through the neonatal unit and return home, enhancing parental coping and potentially improving infant outcomes and reducing the infants length of stay at the neonatal unit.
Perhaps the most important limitation is was the lack homogeneity between studies in terms of treatment dose, length of treatment, timing of treatment, age of the infants, length of follow-up, and variables assessed.
However, in a randomised controlled trial, Melnyk et al., demonstrated that the COPE program, which focuses on providing parents with a very structured educational-behavioural program, improves parent coping and mental health outcomes during and after hospitalization, as well as shortening infants' length of stay [ 6].
Infant length and length of young children unable to stand for the height assessment were measured twice to the nearest 0.1 cm with the child in a recumbent position using a pediatric length board.
The same SNPs explained 2.95% of the variance of infant length.
We are aware of the potential limitation regarding the measurement of infant length.
In addition, we found that variants in 58 of the adult height loci were associated with infant length at an FDR of 5% (Supplementary Material, Table S8; Fig. 4, QQ-plot of 180 SNPs and infant length).
Although, there is some overlap between adult height loci and birth length, which is illustrated by 17 shared loci, the genetic architecture of adult height seems more similar to the genetic architecture of infant length than birth length [58 shared loci for infant length, based on conservative statistical method (FDR)].
We tested the associations of rs905938[C] with 'fetal growth' measures in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd trimester of pregnancy in the Generation R Study (N = 5756) (11), infant length at 1 year of age (range 6 18 months; N = 28 228) in the Early Growth Genetics (EGG) consortium (12), and adult height in the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits (GIANT) consortium (N = 127 5127 (5).
Whereas the NSHD does not have data on infant length before the age of 2 y, a trend toward increased height attributable to BMI-increasing alleles was not observed until much later, at 6 y of age.
