10.2.4 Apgar score and risk of seizures in CP patients

The risk of epilepsy is inversely proportional to the Apgar scores of term babies, both at 5 and 10 minutes. This is significant even with relatively minor reductions in these scores [35].

Low Apgar scores were also recognized as risk factors for epilepsy in the general population in some other studies [36, 37].

No relationship has been found between the risk of epilepsy development and gestational age [31]. In a study where 173 patients were categorized according to their birth weight as appropriate for gestational age (76.9%), small for gestational age (12.1%), and large for gestational age (11%), they found no correlation between birth weight and risk of epilepsy development [38].

However, other studies reveal that low birth weight and prematurity increase the risk of epilepsy development in patients with CP [12, 37, 39]. These studies assessed Apgar scores and determined that premature babies have lower Apgar scores; they suggested that the increased risk of epilepsy development among premature babies was actually related to low Apgar scores.
