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Should cranial MRI screening of preterm infants become routine?

Nature Clinical Practice Neurology volume 3, pages 532–533 (2007)Cite this article

Approximately 2% of infants are born before 32 weeks of gestation. With modern intensive care about 85% of these babies survive, totalling over 70,000 children per year in the US.1 Rates of neurological disabilities remain high. Cerebral palsy (CP) still occurs in about 10% of infants with the youngest gestational age (22–26 weeks of gestation) and in 7% of infants born between 27 and 32 weeks of gestation.2 Problems related to attention, executive functioning and fine motor skills affect a much higher proportion.2,3

Cranial ultrasound (cUS) detects major intracranial lesions, such as large intraventricular and parenchymal hemorrhage (grade III–IV) or cystic periventricular leukomalacia, all strongly predictive of CP and of severe cognitive impairment.4 Not all children who develop CP have lesions that can be identified on cUS, however, and some cUS-defined lesions do not provide a neuroimaging correlate for the more subtle neurodevelopmental difficulties frequently encountered in the preterm population. We now recognize that diffuse noncystic white matter (WM) abnormality, often referred to as 'periventricular WM injury', is common in preterm infants and might be a marker for these more subtle problems.5,6,7

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LS de Vries is Professor of Neonatal Neurology at Wilhelmina Children's Hospital, Utrecht, The Netherlands.,

    Linda S de Vries

  2. FM Cowan is Senior Lecturer in Perinatal Neurology at Imperial College, London, UK.,

    Frances M Cowan

Authors
  1. Linda S de Vries
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  2. Frances M Cowan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Linda S de Vries.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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de Vries, L., Cowan, F. Should cranial MRI screening of preterm infants become routine?. Nat Rev Neurol 3, 532–533 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncpneuro0608

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