Introduction:

Visual evoked potentials (VEP) evaluate the visual pathway through small neuroelectric responses from the occipital cortex. They constitute a non-invasive test to determine visual function in premature babies, newborns, infants, children with brain malformations, metabolic diseases or mental retardation.

Objective:

To describe the clinical characteristics and the results of Flash Visual Evoked Potentials in children under 5 years of age during the time period from December 2017 to December 2018.

Materials and Methods:

This was an observational, descriptive and ambispective design with an analytical component. The patients included children from 0 to 5 years of age who underwent VEP at the Pediatric Hospital in the period from December 2017 to December 2018. We used non-probabilistic sampling of consecutive cases. Main variables: Age, sex, place of residence, professional who requested the study, reason for requesting the study, maternal and perinatal data, VEP results. Data were analyzed with SPSSv 21, using descriptive statistics.

Results:

110 patients who underwent VEP were studied, the median age was 32 months, the male sex predominated, most lived in the Central department (63.6%). Most of the patients had infantile cerebral palsy (ICP), neurologists most frequently requested the study. Using the perinatal history, we determined that a lower gestational age, lower birth weight, lower Apgar score, and a history of perinatal hospitalization were associated with alterations in the latency and amplitude values for the P100 wave in both eyes, this relationship was statistically significant.

Conclusion:

Although the majority of the VEP results were normal, there is an important relationship between the perinatal history and the alteration of the result, especially with respect to the Apgar at 1 min, which shows an inverse relationship.

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