This graph shows the proportion of children born very preterm and term born
children who have difficulties associated with ADHD. The y-axis shows
the percentage of children with difficulties so the higher the bars the
greater the proportion of children with difficulties in those areas. Looking
first at the pair of bars on the left this shows the proportion of children
with attention problems with the very preterm children shown in blue and the
term born children in orange you can see that the very preterm children are at
markedly higher risk for attention problems with 17% of very preterm
children having clinically significant attention problems compared with just 4%
of the children born at term. This is a large difference of 13%, however when you
look at the pair of bars on the right you can see that the rates of
hyperactivity problems are fairly similar between the groups with 9% of
very preterm children having hyperactivity problems compared with 7%
of their term born peers, a difference of just 2%. In summary this graph shows that
even though children born very preterm have similar rates of hyperactivity to
children born at term they are almost four times more likely to have attention
problems