DOI: 10.36347/sjams.2018.v06i04.058

Pages: 1660-1667

Low birth weight by international agreement has been defined as a birth weight of less than 2500 grams. Birth weight is the single most important criterion for determining the neonatal and infant survival. Despite consistent efforts to improve the quality of maternal and child health, more than twenty million low birth-weight (LBW) babies are born every year throughout the world. To estimate the proportion of live LBW neonates and proportion deaths among them, to identify the common causes of deaths among such neonates, to find out the maternal risk factors associated with LBW, and to assess the short-term outcomes of treated LBW infants. The present study was conducted as a descriptive cross sectional study on a group of 157 low birth weight neonates, who were admitted to neonatal ICU of Misurata Teaching Hospital, Libya. We retrospectively analyzed the hospital records over a period of one year from January 2015 to December 2015. The collected data include the babies’ demographic char¬acteristics, history, clinical presentation, Apgar score, maternal risk factors, interventions used and outcome of these neonates. Among the studied 157 LBW Nneonates, (50.3 %) are girls, (48.4%) are boys and (1.3%) are ambiguous. About (77.1%) of LBW babies were survived, while only (22.9%) of them died with more neonatal deaths are founded among girl babies. Majority of LBW neonates are borne to multi-gravid mothers (59.9%) aged 25-30 years (26.7%) and (62.4 %) delivered by CS. Neonates are of LBW (79%), VLBW (14.6%) and ELBW (6.4%) respectively. The majority of them are of gestational age 34-38 Wks (44.6%). There is significant neonatal death among ELBW and VLBW, especially those aged 24-26 Wks. (28.7%) of the studied LBW cases have APGAR score < 7. SROM, drugs, APH, Liquor and HTN are the main maternal risk factors detected (35.7%, 23.6, 8.9% and 8.9%) respectively. The main diagnosis of LBW neonates was RDS, sepsis, congenital anomalies (mainly CHD) and pneumothorax (35.7%, 15.9