Proceedings of the 14th International Newborn Brain Conference: Long-term outcome studies, developmental care, palliative care, ethical dilemmas, and challenging clinical scenarios in neonatal neurology

BACKGROUND:Infants  34 weeks gestation are at relatively low-risk for developmental delay and do not qualify for high-risk infant follow-up based on prematurity alone.However, with prolonged neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) hospitalization and life-sustaining interventions, there is an increased risk for neurodevelopmental impairment in this population.Currently, there is no standardized risk stratifi cation to predict which infants  34 weeks gestation are at highest risk for delays.We aim to compare key clinical characteristics of infants with normal vs. abnormal developmental screening in the primary care setting.Our secondary aim is to identify which infants in this cohort would benefi t most from early developmental intervention.We hypothesize that gestational age alone is not predictive of normal development. METHODS:We performed a retrospective cohort study of infants born  34 weeks gestation between 1/2013-12/2015, admitted to the Children's Wisconsin (CW) NICU, and followed by a Wisconsin-based primary care provider for routine developmental screening at 3-6 years of age.Developmental screening results reported either in the primary care visit note or any CW subspecialty clinic note were included for analysis.Screening was considered abnormal if developmental concerns in cognition, motor, language, and/or social domains were documented.In addition, neonatal diagnoses, procedures, and clinical characteristics were extracted.Mann Whitney, Chi-Square, and Fisher's exact tests were used to compare patients with normal vs. abnormal preschool age development. RESULTS:We screened 1345 NICU infant charts, and 88% received primary care developmental screening (Figure 1).We identifi ed 559 (47%) infants with abnormal