An optimality score for the neurologic examination of the term newborn☆,☆☆,★
Section snippets
Subjects and Methods
Mothers of infants admitted to the postnatal ward in the Queen Charlotte and Chelsea Hospital were asked to volunteer to have a neurologic examination and a cranial ultrasonographic scan performed on their infants. Examiners visited the hospital 2 or 3 days a week over a period of 6 months. On those days they tried to examine all the available term infants. The only inclusion criteria were that the children were regarded as normal and that their postnatal age was between 6 and 48 hours. Because
Results
Two hundred and fifty of 253 mothers who were asked to volunteer for the project agreed to the clinical neurologic examination. Twenty-six infants were excluded because their gestational age was below 37 weeks or because they had low Apgar scores or low cord pH. The gestational age of the infants included ranged between 37 and 42 weeks (mean age, 40.2 weeks). The characteristics of the population studied are listed in Table I.
Parity Maternal age (y) Mode of
Discussion
Although there have been considerable advances in the use of imaging and neurophysiologic techniques in newborns with neurologic problems over the last 2 decades, the neurologic examination still plays an important role in the assessment of the newborn. There is still the need for improvement in its sensitivity to detect clinical neurologic abnormalities.
On the basis of 15 years of experience with the Dubowitz neurologic examination, we realized that the method needed to be updated, eliminating
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2022, Clinics in Perinatology
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From the Department of Paediatrics and Neonatal Medicine, Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London, UK.
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Reprint requests: Lilly Dubowitz, Department of Paediatrics, Hammersmith Hospital, Du Cane Rd, London W12 OHS, UK.
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0022-3476/98/$5.00 + 0 9/21/88989