Cardiotocography pattern: not always a true friend
Main Article Content
Keywords
tachycardia, neonatal asphyxia, cardiotocography, fetal monitoring, arrhythmia, operative delivery.
Abstract
Fetal well-being in labor could be assessed trough cardiotocography (CTG). Some doubts have been raised about its unequivocal applicability. Pathological CTG is in most cases connected to fetal acidosis at birth, but other potential causes must be considered in the differential diagnosis.
A 31-years-old G2P1 patient referred to our Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology for her scheduled post-term CTG at 40 weeks and 3 days of gestation. The pregnancy was uneventful. CTG was classified as suspicious, and after pharmacological induction, it switched as pathological: an emergency cesarean section was performed. Venous and arterial blood sample taken from the umbilical cord were normal. The next assessments revealed that Atrial Flutter (AFL) occurred at birth.
Suspicious CTG is not always associated to neonatal asphyxia. Cardiotocography can help not only in the evaluation of fetal distress, but also in the assessment of global fetal cardiac activity.
The presence of a fetal heart defect should be considered when CTG is suspicious.
Downloads
References
2. Georgoulas G, Karvelis P, Gavrilis D, et al. An ordinal classification approach for CTG categorization. Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual International Conference, 2017; 2642–2645. https://doi.org/10.1109/EMBC.2017.8037400
3. Ekengård F, Cardell M, Herbst A. Low sensitivity of the new FIGO classification system for electronic fetal monitoring to identify fetal acidosis in the second stage of labor. Eur J Obstet Gynecol Reprod Biol X. 2020 Nov 25; 1-5. 9:100120. doi: 10.1016/j.eurox.2020.100120. PMID: 33319210; PMCID: PMC7724159.
4. Isik DU, Celik IH, Kavurt S, Aydemir O, et al. A case series of neonatal arrhythmias. J Matern Fetal Neonatal Med. 2016;29(8):1344-7. doi: 10.3109/14767058.2015.1048679. Epub 2015 Jun 3. PMID: 26037725.
Article Sidebar
Article Details
How to Cite
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Transfer of Copyright and Permission to Reproduce Parts of Published Papers.
Authors retain the copyright for their published work. No formal permission will be required to reproduce parts (tables or illustrations) of published papers, provided the source is quoted appropriately and reproduction has no commercial intent. Reproductions with commercial intent will require written permission and payment of royalties.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.