Introduction: Preterm birth has been associated with a high frequency of developmental disturbances and risk for long-term cognitive, affective and behavioral problems. Therefore, the goal of this study was to compare the level of mood disorders and anxiety symptoms, as well as behavioral disorders including hyperactivity/attention deficit problems, and oppositional defiant problems, and to compare the conduct problems between preterm and term children at elementary-school age.

Methods: The research had a causal-comparative approach. Of the 260 of 400 parents who responded, 215 had full reports on Child Behavioral Checklist and obstetric conditions questionnaire; 27 preterm children were compared with term counterparts, who were paired according to gender and age. Data were analyzed using SPSS (version 20), descriptive statistics and multiple-way analysis of variance (MANOVA).

Results: The results of this study showed that, children who were born preterm had significantly higher levels of affective disorder, anxiety disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder scores compared with the controls.

Conclusions: Preterm birth is associated with affective and behavioral problems. Together with the results of our study, these findings suggest that mechanisms linking early environment with later-life susceptibility to clinical outcomes might include mechanisms leading to shorter gestation age.