Sir.—Meidell et al1 have shown that of 40 premature infants, representing all inborn patients admitted to their service over a 12-month period, 15 (38%) experienced an intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) at a mean time of 1.9 hours after birth. The SE of the mean was 0.2 hours, which suggests that the hemorrhages were clustered into a reasonably small range. While their data may be accurate, we feel that it may not be representative of other investigators' observations.
We have been conducting a study involving all admissions to our highrisk nursery over the past ten months.
In that period, 94 infants weighing less than 1,500 g were admitted and received sonograms within 12 hours. Five (5.3%) of the infants (three inborn) had sustained an ICH. Two previous studies2,3 demonstrated that only 5% to 10% of all admissions hemorrhaged within 12 hours. A fourth study,4 which entered alternate patients and included