Does early, continuous, brain monitoring correlate to long-term outcomes?
In term infants, amplitude-integrated EEG (aEEG) has been shown to be very reliable in evaluating background brain function and predicting long term outcomes after hypoxic ischemic events that occurred near the time of birth. aEEG in conjunction with clinical history and other neurological examinations has been found to give the highest positive predictive value of long-term outcome than any one of these assessments alone (Shalak et al, 2003). Studies have shown that patterns on aEEG have a high concordance with conventional multi-channel neonatal EEG, despite the fact that aEEG monitors are applied by NICU clinicians using only a few electrodes on the scalp. The severity of aEEG patterns has also been shown to correlate with the extent and patterns of cerebral injury seen on subsequent MRI studies (Shah et al, 2006). Other studies have demonstrated aEEG patterns recorded in the first 3-6 hours of life are predictive of later neurodevelopmental outcome (Toet et al, 1999). There is even
