Evaluation of Dehydration and Hypernatremia in Neonates Admitted to Tabriz Children's Hospital

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Hypernatremia in neonates is a potentially devastating condition and is mainly is due to dehydration. Hypernatremia may result in serious and permanent squeals in infants. Therefore we designed this study to evaluate demographic, clinical and laboratory findings of neonates hospitalized with, hypernatremia and dehydration to uncover their associated or predictive risk factors. Materials and Methods: This is a cross-sectional and analytical-descriptive study on 300 neonates who were consecutively admitted to Tabriz Children's Hospital because of non-surgical problems, from April 2006 to September 2007. Only those neonates enrolled in this study whose hospital files contained the needed data on admission. Two separate classifications were used for allocation of studied neonates in the case or control groups: "with versus without hypernatremia"; then the studied variables were compared between two groups by using Chi-square statistics and Independent samples t-test. Results: We studied 300 neonates (66% males and 34% females) at the age of 1 to 28 days (mean: 5.396.16). There were 27 (9%) hypernatremic versus 273 (91%) neonates without hypernatremia. Birth by vaginal delivery (P=0.009) and being term (P=0.001) were significantly more frequent in hypernatremic cases. The amounts of birth weight (P=0.031), weight-loss percentage (P=0.003), body temperature (P=0.007) and serum levels of total (P=0.031) bilirubin all were significantly higher in hypernatremic cases than non-hypernatremic controls. Moreover, we found 9 (3%) dehydrated neonates. The frequency of Hypernatremia was 4 (44/4 %); the age of dehydrated newborns at admission time was (109/3). Conclusion: Hypernatremia is more common in dehydrated neonates and fever, tachycardia or a weight loss of more than 10% of birth weight is the most common sign of them. To avoid any delay in diagnosis and treatment of hypernatremia and dehydration in neonates it is necessary to measure the serum sodium of all newborn infants admitted with these signs .weighting of neonates in first two weeks of life is the best way of screening for this complication.