Abstract â–¡ 57

A retrospective study was conducted on 447 infants referred to the Institute for home monitoring. Within this study group there were 193 siblings of SIDS victims, 30 with other family history of SIDS, 172 ALTE infants, 46 siblings of an ALTE infant, and 6 infants referred because of parental anxiety. All infants were followed at home on documented apnea/bradycardia monitors and all underwent a nap/feeding study in an environmentally controlled laboratory setting. The objective of our retrospective study was to evaluate the combination of epidemiologic and physiologic variables in identifying infants at risk for prolonged bradycardia. Prolonged bradycardia was defined for this study as a heart rate less than 80 bpm* for at least 15 seconds in duration.

A classification tree was formulated using variables that best discriminated between infants that had episodes of bradycardia from those that remained episode free. When following the classification criteria of the tree the following results were obtained.

Results of classification. (Table)

Table 1
Full size table