The reliability of the VEP in infancy

Abstract

Increasingly the VEP is being used to assess possible visual pathway dysfunction in very young infants. Therefore its normal parameters should be known. As the infant's VEP undergoes rapid morphological changes and is prone to both intra- and inter-individual variation we undertook a longitudinal study of the Hash VEP of 15 normal infants. The neonatal VEP exhibited a simple morphology which became more complex over the ensuing two to three months to approach the adult waveform. Both N1 and P2 latencies decreased with increasing age in a highly statistically significant relationship but with the exception of the total VEP amplitude, which increased in the first year of life, amplitude measurements were not reliably related to age.