Neonatal Period Essay

Neonatal period is a period that refers the first 4 weeks or 28 days of life. It can be further divided into too early neonates (birth to 24 hours), early neonate (birth to 7 days) and late neonatal period (7 days to 28 days). The neonatal sickness pattern include: prematurity (32.30%), sepsis (28.91%), birth asphyxia (11%), meconium aspiration syndrome (5%), congenital malformations (5%), transient tachypnea of newborn (5%), neonatal jaundice (5%), intrauterine growth restriction (3%), infant of diabetic mother (2.5%) , seizure disorder (1.80%) and bleeding diathesis(0.50%).(28). But, most of these causes are preventable (29).

The neonatal period is the most vulnerable period of human life. A neonate is 500 times more likely to die on the first day of life compared to a child who one month age (30). Similarly, neonatal disease pattern is a sensitive indicator of availability, use, and effectiveness of mother and child health services in the community (31). This indicates that neonatal death is one of the health problems in developing countries and newborn survival has no improvement (32).

For example, the incidence of sicknesses was a mean of 2 sicknesses per neonate. The case fatality in 13 sicknesses was also more than 10%. Only 2.6% neonates were seen or treated by a physician, and 0.4% was hospitalized. Hypothermia, fever, upper respiratory symptoms, umbilical, and skin infections, and conjunctivitis showed statistically significant seasonal variation. Although the sicknesses were concentrated in the first week of life, new cases continued to appear throughout the neonatal period. Various sicknesses showed a different distribution of incidence during 1 to 28 days