ABSTRACT
Neonatal encephalopathy manifested by seizures, lethargy or coma, hypotonia, poor feeding, and difficulty controlling respiration requires prompt evaluation because it often reflects a major neurological disorder. It occurs with an incidence of about 4=1000 term infants throughout the world. In 1976, Sarnat and Sarnat described encephalopathy from hypoxia-ischemia following fetal distress in full term infants and staged its severity by correlating clinical signs with electroencephalography. In 1998, Badawi and colleagues reported the first large prospective study of neonatal encephalopathy, the Western Australia study. In contrast to previous reports that focused on intrapartum asphyxia as the cause of newborn encephalopathy, the Western Australia study revealed a diverse group of antenatal etiologies unrelated to hypoxia in more than 70% of cases.
