Concordance between neurologic screening test and neurologic examination in newborns

The aims of this study were to calculate concordance among results of the assessment of a population of neonates by using a screening version of neurologic assessment developed by our group with the Amiel-Tison examination, to evaluate distribution of the findings for each item in the studied population, and to develop an optimality score to aid in the detection of possible deviations in infants. Infants in this report include 107 infants born consecutively; they were mainly at-term infants, or preterm infants who, when reaching at-term corrected age, were suspected to be abnormal with a wide spectrum of complications. Newborns were tested by neurologic screening and neurologic examination. Agreement, correlations among tests, sensitivity, and specificity were calculated. Correlation among results from Neurological Screening and Neurological Examination was significant (rho = 0.759, p = 0.01), and Cronbach's alpha concordance had an acceptable value (0.83). Sensitivity and specificity of neurologic screening after Amiel-Tison examination comparison were 0.98 and 0.82, respectively. Our results support the use of the neurologic screening proposed.