Participants
brain damage, cerebral palsy, fidgety
RECRUITMENT, CEREBRAL PALSY
The study was conducted between June 2018 and August 2019 in Istanbul, Türkiye, and the infants were referred from a territory neonatal intensive care unit in the same city. We invited 98 parents of premature infants to the study by telephone. Of these parents, 30 refused to participate in the study, citing transportation problems to the study center and problems with taking time off from work. Researchers of this paper previously published the participation attitudes of the parents (Altunalan et al., We determined the eligibility of infants for the study based on their level of neurodevelopmental risk. We took infants’ biological risk factors from the Neonatal Intensive Care discharge report, whereas socioeconomic factors were recorded during parents’ interviews. The infants at a high risk of cerebral palsy (based on neurological examination, grades II, III, and IV cranial imaging, and cramped synchronized or absent fidgety movements in General Movements Analyses) (Novak et al., CONSORT flow diagram displaying participants’ recruitment and analysis.Although preterm infants have a high risk of cerebral palsy and need more early intervention, we excluded those infants from our study because this was the first study investigating the effectiveness of the Explorer Baby program. After assessing the results of this initial study, the authors would like to conduct another study on infants at high risk of brain damage.