Significance of hypocalcaemia in neonatal convulsions.

For many years birth trauma has been stated to be the commonest cause of neonatal convulsions; there have, however, been few prospective studies to support this view. In 1954 Burke studied 46 infants who had had convulsions in the first 2 weeks of life; in 70% of the series she found birth trauma or anoxia during birth to have been the likely cause of the fit, and over a third of the infants concerned died in the neonatal period. In the past decade attention has increasingly been focused on those convulsions in the newborn due to metabolic disturbances, particularly the two relatively common temporary abnormalities of neonatal metabolism-hypoglycaemia and hypocalcaemia. Baum and his colleagues from Hammersmith Hospital have recently suggested (Baum, Cooper, and Davies, 1968) that symptomatic hypocalcaemia is becoming more frequent, and Paine (1968), in an excellent review of fits in the newborn, found that tetany was the cause of fits in 17 of 35 neonates in the Children's Hospital, Washington D.C., in 1966, who survived for over a year.