Post-Intensive Care Syndrome in Newborns from a Nutritional and Neuromotor Perspective

Premature newborns who need prolonged hospital stays may develop Post-Intensive Care Syndrome, which, as the term itself suggests, is characterized by post-hospital changes that manifest themselves in the physical, cognitive and/or nutritional fields. The advance of care in recent decades has provided greater survival for the newborns, thus allowing initial studies to characterize signs and symptoms which may indicate, in the future, the risk of developing PICS. Given the above, the aim of this study was to characterize and verify the prevalence of signs related to PICs in the neuro psychomotor and nutritional domains in children followed at a public hospital in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. To this end, an observational, cross-sectional, prospective study was carried out in the period from October 2016 to June 2017. The sample consisted of 26 children, 77% male, 58% of cesarean delivery and age from 1 to 12 months. The birth took place at 26 to 41 weeks of gestation and these newborns remained hospitalized in the NICU for 6 to 97 days. Birth weight was diagnosed as adequate for 92% of these newborns, considering their prematurity. After hospitalization, the prevalence of adequate weight for these children decreased to 81% and a new nutritional diagnosis of low weight was established. As expected, premature children and children with a nutritional diagnosis of low weight stayed longer in the ICU. Complementarily, our study observed that children with longer hospital stays tend to have an altered motor development. Noteworthy, this is one of the first studies on the subject and demonstrated that there is a tendency for changes in the motor and nutritional performance of children who remain hospitalized in the ICU, bringing the need for future studies with more robust samples and followed for more time.