Early prediction of symptomatic patent ductus arteriosus from perinatal risk factors: a discriminant analysis model

A scoring system based on discriminant analysis was devised to predict, within 24 hours after birth, whether or not a premature infant will subsequently develop a symptomatic PDA. Five risk factors including birth weight, the diagnosis of hyaline membrane disease, intrauterine growth retardation, acute perinatal stress, and treatment with distending airway pressure were reduced to a discriminant score which separated infants with symptomatic PDA from infants without symptomatic PDA. Based on this score, the likelihood that an individual infant would later develop symptomatic PDA could be expressed as a probability function. When applied prospectively, this score predicted the correct outcome of 80% of infants in a test population. This predictive model should be useful in clinical trials and other applications requiring a quantitative expression of risk for developing symptomatic ductus shunting.