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Cerebellar hemorrhagic injury in preterm infants is associated with a high prevalence of long-term pervasive neurodevelopment disabilities and may play an important and underrecognized role in the cognitive, learning, and behavioral dysfunction known to affect survivors.

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Cerebral blood flow pressure-passivity results when pressure autoregulation is impaired, or overwhelmed, and is thought to underlie cerebrovascular injury in the premature infant. Earlier bedside observations suggested that transient periods of cerebral pressure-passivity occurred in premature infants. However, these transient events cannot be detected reliably by intermittent static measurements of pressure autoregulation. We therefore used continuous bedside recordings of mean arterial pressure (MAP; from an indwelling arterial catheter) and cerebral perfusion [using the nearinfrared spectroscopy (NIRS) Hb difference (HbD) signal) to detect cerebral pressure-passivity in the first 5 d after birth in infants with birth weight Ͻ1500 g. Because the Hb difference (HbD) signal [HbD ϭ oxyhemoglobin (HbO2) Ϫ Hb] correlates with cerebral blood flow (CBF), we used coherence between MAP and HbD to define pressure-passivity. We measured the prevalence of pressurepassivity using a pressure-passive index (PPI), defined as the percentage of 10-min epochs with significant low-frequency coherence between the MAP and HbD signals. Pressure-passivity occurred in 87 of 90 premature infants, with a mean PPI of 20.3%. Cerebral pressure-passivity was significantly associated with low gestational age and birth weight, systemic hypotension, and maternal hemodynamic factors, but not with markers of maternal infection. Future studies using consistent serial brain imaging are needed to define the relationship between PPI and cerebrovascular injury in the sick premature infant. C erebral pressure autoregulation maintains CBF relatively constant despite changes over a range of systemic blood pressures known as the autoregulatory plateau (1). Conversely, when changes in blood pressure result in concordant changes in CBF, the cerebral circulation is deemed "pressure passive." Current understanding is that cerebral pressurepassivity develops when changes in blood pressure exceed the capacity of the intact cerebral autoregulatory system or when the system is impaired by illness, injury, or vasoactive medications. Cerebral pressure-passivity is considered a risk factor for cerebrovascular injury in the sick premature infant (2-4). The current study extends our earlier work (3) using bedside NIRS to measure continuously cerebrovascular responses to spontaneous fluctuations in blood pressure. In our previous studies, we observed that cerebral pressure-passivity may wax and wane over relatively short periods in premature infants. To study the fluctuating nature of cerebral pressure-passivity and quantify its prevalence over time, we developed a continuous recording and analysis system because previously described techniques using intermittent static measurements (5-7) would be unable to measure the prevalence of fluctuating cerebral pressure-passivity over the highest risk for brain injury in premature infants. The principal aim of this technique is to make quantitative measurements of the prevalence of cerebral pressure-passivity rather...