This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

KARIN B. NELSON, MD; JONAS H. ELLENBERG, PHD
National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke 7550 Wisconsin Ave Room 8C-16 Bethesda, MD 20892

Am J Dis Child. 1988;142(8):814-815.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.—Dr Copian is correct that a higher proportion of infants in the Collaborative Perinatal Project of the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke (NCPP) study population who had birth complications and low Apgar scores died early and therefore were not candidates for the development of cerebral palsy. That information was presented in an earlier report in JAMA.¹ Since our recent report was concerned chiefly with whether a surviving term child with birth complications was at heightened risk for disability if he or she was asymptomatic as a newborn, we did not reexamine the question of mortality.

It would be possible to speculate, for children in this study who died, the effect on the results if they had lived. If the children who died had lived and had had a similar distribution of neonatal signs as the children who really did survive, then the comparative risks of cerebral palsy in the complicated and uncomplicated groups would have remained substantially unchanged. If, on the other hand, a large proportion of the nonsurviving children had lived and had a very high rate of multiple neonatal signs, then the results might have been markedly different. There seems to be no reasonable argument based on NCPP data for a choice of one assumption . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?