Cord blood hematological profile of normal Indian neonates at an altitude of 3000 feet and above to the sea level

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Knowledge and cognizance of various hemopoietin cells and cord blood hematological profile of a new born has helped the mankind in not only early detection of various genetic, metabolic, hematological and malignant diseases but also to cure them. However, there is lot of variation in standard baseline reference values of hematological profile in newborns with regard to age,
gender and demography. This study therefore aimed to analyze hematological values of cord blood of normal Indian neonates at an altitude of more than 3000 feet above sea level. Objective: This study was conducted to record and analyze the complete hematological profile of cord blood of a normal newborn at an altitude of 3000 feet and above the sea level. Methods: This was a tertiary care hospital based longitudinal observational study of hematological profile of cord blood of 200 normal term newborns. The various hematological parameters were analyzed and distributed accordingly to gender and the type of delivery. The continuous data was expressed as mean and standard deviation and the discrete data was expressed as percentage. The difference of variances of different baseline parameters were analyzed using student t- test as per gender and mode of delivery. The p-value less than 0.05 was considered as statistically significant.
Results: The mean hemoglobin, hematocrit, white blood cell count, red blood cell count, platelet count, reticulocyte count and nucleated RBC of the study population was 15.72±1.67g/dl,49.13±5.49%, 14.70±3.96x109/L, 4.50±0.59x109 /L, 283.40±74.08x109
/L, 4.32±0.87% and 6.87±4.60/100 WBC respectively. There was no statistical difference in the hematological parameters of male and female newborns except in hemoglobin value of 16.02±1.62g/dl and 15.44±1.68g/dl respectively with p<0.01.The mode of delivery had no significant impact on the differences in the various hematological values.
Conclusion: This study is one of its kind conducted at an altitude of more than 3000 feet above sea level in northern part of India to evaluate various cord blood hematological parameters and is comparable to the other studies done at high altitude throughout the globe. Further studies are needed with large sample size from the different geographical areas of this region