11/22/2023 0 Comments Apgar score babyIf your baby gets low Apgar scores at one and five minutes, very rarely does it mean your baby will have a difficult newborn course or face a life of health problems. What does an Apgar score mean for a baby’s future? If your baby’s score is 7 or more, you should be reassured that your baby is transitioning well. ![]() Most newborns lose at least a point for color it’s normal for a baby’s hands and feet to be a little blue – it’s just part of the process a baby’s circulation goes through adapting to life outside the uterus. Very few babies get a perfect Apgar score – in fact at our hospital, fewer than 1 in 100 get that perfect 10. If your baby doesn’t get a 10 at one minute or even after five minutes, don’t worry. The Apgar score is just a quick way for us to assess a newborn’s condition at one minute of life. ![]() We’ll start resuscitation efforts immediately if it’s needed. This doesn’t mean that if your baby needs help breathing, we sit around and wait until the one-minute test tells us so. If the Apgar score is below 7 at five minutes, we’ll do it again at 10 minutes. The test is given to a baby both at one minute and five minutes after birth. The Apgar test scores five elements on a scale of 0 to 2 for a total score that can range from 0 to 10: But we also need to remember that the Apgar score is not generally a predictor of future health, it’s just a quick glimpse at a newborn’s condition at a specific point in time. Parents can recall their children’s Apgar scores like they do their own SAT scores – I know I do. In this day and age where competition starts early in life, a low score looks like their baby didn’t perform well. I find that parents tend to obsess over their baby’s Apgar score. How the test is administered and scored remains unchanged since 1952, although today we typically see it as a tool to assess how a baby is transitioning from fetal life to newborn life. ![]() For example, if there were two different pain medications that a mother could receive, she wanted to be able to measure and compare the effects on the newborns immediately after birth. The test was developed by anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar, who wanted a way to compare the effects of different practices on newborn babies. Apgar scores have been assigned to newborns for more than half a century, although they are often misunderstood by parents. Babies take their first test one minute after birth.
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