Neuroscience Letters 611 (2016) 59–67 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Neuroscience Letters jo ur nal ho me page: www.elsevier.com/locate/neulet Research paper Longitudinal study of children with perinatal brain damage in whom early neurohabilitation was applied: Preliminary report Thalía Harmony ∗ , Jesús Barrera-Reséndiz, María Elena Juárez-Colín, Cristina Carrillo-Prado, M. del Consuelo Pedraza-Aguilar, Aurora Asprón Ramírez, Manuel Hinojosa-Rodríguez, Thalía Fernández, Josefina Ricardo-Garcell Unidad de Investigación en Neurodesarrollo, Departamento de Neurobiología Conductual y Cognitiva, Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Campus Juriquilla, Mexico h i g h l i g h t s • It is a longitudinal study of perinatal brain damaged children. • Katona’s neurohabilitation procedure was used as treatment. • 89% of preterm ≤34 weeks treated had normal neurodevelopment. • Only 20% of non-treated preterm ≤34 weeks had normal neurodevelopment. • Application of neurohabilitation to perinatal brain damaged infants is recommended. a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 31 March 2015 Received in revised form 26 September 2015 Accepted 10 November 2015 Available online 17 November 2015 Keywords: Perinatal brain damage Prenatal risk factors Neurohabilitation Preterm encephalopathy Hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy MRI a b s t r a c t Objective: The neurohabilitation treatment has been shown to be a successful method for decreasing the sequelae of perinatal brain damage (PBD) in Hungarian population. The goal of this pilot trial was to introduce this procedure by describing the results of its application in infants with PBD as demonstrated by clinical, developmental and MRI studies. As this procedure has proved to be useful, according the declaration of Helsinki, no control clinical trial was permitted. Participants: Infants younger than 2 months of corrected age (CA) with prenatal and/or perinatal risk fac- tors for brain damage. Two groups were considered. One group was treated using the “neurohabilitation” method (n = 20), and the other was not treated (n = 13) because treatment was voluntarily discontinued after the initial evaluation. Evaluations were carried out prior to 2 months of CA and at 6–8 years of age. All children showed abnormal clinical and MRI characteristics in the first study. Results: The treated group had a higher percentage (90%) of children with normal outcome than did the non-treated group (38%; OR = 2.37, CI 95% = 1.2–4.7; p < 0.005). In this latter group, only one out of five (20%) children born at or before 34 weeks of gestational age had a normal outcome. In contrast, eight out of nine treated preterm infants had normal outcomes (8/9 = 89%, OR = 4.45, CI 95% = 0.7–26; p = 0.017). Conclusions: This pilot trial confirms previous studies suggesting that Neurohabilitation decreases the neurological and cognitive sequelae of preterm and at-term infants with PBD. © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Despite advances in medicine and significant improvements in the survival of preterm infants over the last 10–20 years, the inci- dence of births at risk for brain damage has not diminished; in ∗ Corresponding author at: Instituto de Neurobiología, UNAM Campus Juriquilla, Querétaro 76230, México. Tel.: +52 442 1926101x113. E-mail address: thaliah@unam.mx (T. Harmony). fact, some evidence suggests that disability rates have increased [1]. Data in the literature also showed that even preterm children who survive without apparent motor disability, have a substantial reduction in the mean intelligence quotient (IQ) and an increased incidence of cognitive and educational difficulties [2–5]. A revision of the literature related to early interventions pro- grams to study high risk premature infants has shown that when applied to severe low weight preterm babies’ scores [6] or infants with brain lesions [7] did not show any improvement on neurode- velopment. Neurodevelopmental treatment (NDT) is the method http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2015.11.013 0304-3940/© 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.