Practice Points:
EEG/aEEG
- While aEEG is helpful to monitor trends at the bedside and can diagnose most seizures, cEEG remains the gold standard for seizure detection.
- Because of the wide range of start time and frequency of seizures, it is recommended to use either cEEG/aEEG throughout therapeutic hypo- thermia and rewarming, with a minimum of 24 h if resources are limited.
- aEEG background changes over time are predictive of outcome and can add prognostic ability to clinical variables.
NIRS
- Monitoring of regional tissue saturation using NIRS after birth asphyxia is important to provide useful prognostic information at the bedside during the first three days of life.
- Combining cEEG/aEEG and NIRS can potentially improve the predictive values of each modality alone.
Biomarkers
- At present, there is insufficient evidence to support the use of blood or CSF biomarkers to increase diagnostic and predictive accuracy in neonates with NE.
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