Postpartal evaluation of fetal maturity index - methodological remarks

Declaration of the Childbirth in XXI Century introduces among others the rule of the relativity of pregnancy duration, from which comes the necessity of taking into account fetal maturity when making any decision about termination of any individual pregnancy, as well as the necessity of its evaluation according to the Klimek index (K) based on the obligatory postnatal assessment of 6 features of the newborn. These documents are available on the web page www.ginekologia.info.pl together with the description of M. Klimek’s method of computer-
-aided pregnancy monitoring and birth term prediction. We used the above mentioned publications in our study and decided to evaluate the possibility of adapting this simple method based only on literature. We found that the most common errors were in exaggerating the values in assessment of plantar creases because the plantar surface was not flatten and the point count was exaggerated in assessment of the lanugo area due to the fact that not the entire corpus surface (particularly the lateral sides) was taken into account. The K index proved to be a sensitive exponent of the auxological distribution of the newborns’ maturity and gestational age.