Importance of Screening in 0-18 Months Infants by using INFANIB at Tertiary Hospital

Objectives: Child development is a dynamic process and is often hard to measure by its very nature. The various streams of development, including gross motor, fine motor, language, cognitive, and adaptive behaviour, are interrelated and complex within themselves. Developmental delay refers to when a child's development lags behind established normal ranges for his or her age. The prevalence of developmental delay, deviation, disability or deformity in India is 2.5%. So the objective of this study was to screen the infants at Tertiary hospital and to categorize them as normal, transiently abnormal & abnormal neurologic development according to the INFANIB score.

Design: Cross sectional study

Method: 639 subjects were included in this study. According to the INFANIB manual guidelines, screening test was administered and infants were categorized as normal, transiently abnormal and abnormal neurologic development. Then, the data was evaluated statistically and results were obtained.

Results: In Group 1(age of less than 4 months) as per INFANIB score out of 194 samples there were 161(82.99%) normal, 24(12.37%) transiently abnormal and 9(4.64%) abnormal neurologic development infants. Group 2 (age of 4-8 month) had 162(86.63%) normal, 12(6.42%) transiently abnormal and 13(6.95%) abnormal neurologic development infants out of 187 samples. In Group 3(age of 8 months or more) out of 258 samples there were 205(79.46%) normal, 18(6.98%) transiently abnormal and 35(13.57%) abnormal neurologic development infants. When all three age groups were considered, there were 528(82.63%) normal, 54(8.45%) transiently abnormal, 57(8.92%) abnormal neurologic development infants.

Conclusion: On INFANIB screening, there were 8.45% transiently abnormal and 8.92% abnormal neurologic development infants at the Tertiary hospital.