General Movements Assessment of infants in the neonatal intensive care unit following surgery.

AIM: There is an identified gap in the literature regarding the use of the General Movements (GMs) Assessment to identify risk in infants post-surgery. This paper aims to examine the GMs for infants who have undergone surgery to identify common risk profiles in the writhing age.

METHODS

This was a prospective cohort study of 170 infants (99 male, 58%) admitted to a neonatal surgical unit from 2012 until June 2014. Infants were born at a mean age of 38 weeks (standard deviation (SD) 2.3), and writhing GMs were conducted at term (40 weeks, SD 2.6) following either cardiac (n = 84, 49%) or non-cardiac surgery (n = 86, 51%). GMs were categorised by three trained assessors.

RESULTS

Normal writhing was recorded in 64 infants (38%). The most common profile was poor repertoire (n = 80, 47%), with 14 (8%) cramped synchronised. There was no difference in scores between infants who had undergone cardiac versus non-cardiac surgery (P = 0.45).

CONCLUSION

This is the first report on the GMs assessment in an infant surgical population. Infants who have undergone surgery most commonly display poor repertoire writhing movements. Research is needed to determine the ability of the GMs to predict neurodevelopmental outcomes in this population.