Objective-To determine the long-term outcome of neonatal dehydration.Study design-We identified 182 newborns rehospitalized with dehydration (weight loss ≥12% of birth weight and/or serum sodium ≥150 mEq/L) and 419 randomly selected controls from a cohort of 106,627 term and near-term infants ≥2000 g born from 1995 through 1998 in Northern California Kaiser Permanente hospitals. Outcomes data were obtained from electronic records, interviews, questionnaire responses, and neurodevelopmental evaluations performed in a masked fashion.Results-Follow-up data to the age of at least two years were available for 173/182 children with a history of dehydration (95%) and 372/419 controls (89%) and included formal evaluation at a mean (±SD) age of 5.1±0.12 years for 106 children (58%) and 168 children (40%) respectively. None of the cases developed shock, gangrene, or respiratory failure. Neither crude nor adjusted scores on cognitive tests differed significantly between groups. There was no significant difference between groups in the proportion of children with abnormal neurologic examinations or neurologic diagnoses. Frequencies of parental concerns and reported behavior problems also were not significantly different in the two groups.Conclusions-Neonatal dehydration in this managed care setting was not associated with adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in infants born at or near term. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. In this report, we focus on non-diarrheal neonatal dehydration. We studied a cohort from the Northern California Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program (KPMCP), a mature managed care organization with integrated information systems. (6,(16)(17)(18)(19)(20) Given the pathophysiology of dehydration, which does not appear to affect any one particular part of the brain, we did not expect to find discrete neurological deficits among our cohort. We expected to find non-specific neurodevelopmental problems affecting multiple domains (i.e., decreases in performance across multiple areas measured).
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METHODSThis report covers two of the three cohorts in the Jaundice and Infant Feeding ("JIFee") study, a follow-up study of infants with neonatal jaundice or dehydration and randomly selected controls. We identified subjects born in 1995-96 in previous nested-case-control studies. (6,19,21) Study participants were drawn from 1995-98 KPMCP live births (N=106,627) with birth weights of at least 2000 grams and gestational age of at least 36 weeks (1995-96 cohorts) or 34 weeks (1997-98 cohorts). Eligible subjects had to meet the dehydration d...