Original ArticlesNeonatal Nucleated Red Blood Cell and Lymphocyte Counts in Fetal Brain Injury 1
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
Singleton, term infants (37 weeks’ gestation or greater) with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy in the neonatal period and resulting permanent neurologic impairment were identified in a national registry for brain-injured infants established in 1991. All neurologic injuries were confirmed by a pediatric neurologist. The details of the population and the study methods have been described previously.1, 2Subjects were excluded if they had conditions known to be associated with elevated nucleated RBC
Results
Of the 292 patients in the registry, 101 met entry criteria. Reasons for exclusions and the composition of the final study population are listed in Table 1. Sixty-six of these patients (65%) were from the preadmission-injury group and 35 (35%) were from the acute-injury group. Maternal demographic features with respect to age, gravidity, parity, abortions, gestational age at the time of delivery, antenatal complications, and prenatal care were similar for both groups. The types of events
Discussion
It appeared that lymphocyte counts were more likely to be elevated among neonates with fetal asphyxial injury than among normal neonates. This elevation was transient and the counts decreased rapidly from the time of birth and normalized in less than 24 hours. Only 62% of the brain-injured infants had lymphocyte counts greater than 8000 cells/mm3 in the first 6 hours of life. Therefore, lymphocyte count cannot be considered a categoric indicator of brain injury. A large proportion (67%) of the
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This project was sponsored in part by the Childbirth Injury Prevention Foundation.