Correlation of Prechtl Qualitative Assessment of General Movement Analysis with Neurological Evaluation: The Importance of Inspection in Infants

Abstract

Objective: Motor development is at the forefront of evaluation of neurodevelopmental functions in the first 6 months of life. Significant spontaneous movement patterns of infants are called general movements. General movements are rough and complex movements involving the entire body. Prechtl qualitative assesment of general movements (GMA) can be performed in the first 20 weeks. It has been reported that GMA can identify motor problems with 98% sensitivity. Our aim is to investigate the specificity and sensitivity of GMA in our series by comparing the results of GMA and neurological evaluation.

Materials and Methods: Eighty infants who were less than 20 weeks old were included into the study. All infants were assessed with both neurological evaluation and video recording for the GMA at the Spastic Childrens Foundation of Turkey. As a standard technique; video recording was obtained in the GMA room of comfortably dressed infants when they were not sleepy or restless in the GMA room for 3-5 minutes in the supine position. The assessments were based on the corrected age for the preterm infants.

Results: The GMA and neurological evaluation results were found to be incompatible with each other in only 8 of 80 infants. A total of 90 video recordings were made of the 80 infants. Our study revealed that GMA can identify the motor problems with 95.8% sensitivity and 87.5% specificity.

Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that GHA may be an independent method that can identify motor problems during infancy. This study has an importance because it is one of the few independent studies that was completed by a differentiated cerebral palsy center, where GMA is applied as a standard method.