Objectives

The Alberta Infant Motor Scale is used worldwide to assess motor development in children under 18 months of age, both preterm and full-term. In Colombia, the scale is used, but there is little information on the results it yields. The objective of this study was to characterize a retrospective cohort of children under one year of age according to the Alberta scale to generate information about the results of its application in a Colombian population treated at a highly specialized hospital.

Methods

Descriptive, retrospective, cross-sectional study, in which the medical records of 411 children with corrected age between 0 and 12 months and a history of gestational age less than 40 weeks were evaluated. The Alberta scale was applied to all children between 2010 and 2016, and scores were analyzed statistically in a descriptive form.

Results

Most patients were classified by the scale as "normal development" as would be expected based on their medical history. The children in our sample had lower scores than those of the original Canadian sample at all ages.

Conclusions

The scale was useful for screening normal children; however, the patients had lower scores when they were evaluated by the scale than in the original study, thus making evident the need to validate the scale in Colombia and generate reference curves.