Los niños prematuros tienen un alto riesgo de dificultades en el procesamiento auditivo central, evidenciadas mediante los potenciales evocados auditivos

A significant proportion of brain development and networking occurs during the last six weeks of gestation. Therefore, the immature brain is highly susceptible to the consequences of preterm birth, and atypical timing of neurobiological processes. It has been shown that preterm birth impairs brain maturation most frequently in the frontal as well as mid-temporal and parieto-occipital cortices that are important for auditory, language and cognitive processes and for integration of the information received. Many children born preterm have deficits in central auditory processing (CAP) at the level of sound feature encoding. Our follow-up studies showed that children born preterm have also deficits at the level of central auditory discrimination, as indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN). Furthermore, deficits in central auditory discrimination correlated with language acquisition. These deficits often persist from infancy up to school age. For these reasons CAP should be evaluated from early age on to arrange timely and disorder specific rehabilitation.