Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 616

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Phenobarbital Compared with Phenytoin for the Treatment of Neonatal Seizures

Open access
Painter, Michael J., Scher, Mark S., Stein, Aryeh D., Armatti, Stacey, Wang, Zhiming, Gardiner, Joseph C., Paneth, Nigel, Minnigh, Beth, Alvin, John·1999·New England Journal of Medicine

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Seizures occur in 1 to 2 percent of neonates admitted to an intensive care unit. The treatment is usually with either phenobarbital or phenytoin, but the efficacy of the two drugs has not been compared directly. METHODS: From 1990 to 1995, we studied 59 neonates with seizures that were confirmed by electroencephalography. The neonates were randomly assigned to receive either phenobarbital or phenytoin intravenously, at doses sufficient to achieve free plasma concentrations of 25 microg per milliliter for phenobarbital and 3 microg per milliliter for phenytoin. Neonates whose seizures were not controlled by the assigned drug were then treated with both drugs. Seizure control was assessed by electroencephalographic criteria. RESULTS: Seizures were controlled in 13 of the 30 neonates assigned to receive phenobarbital (43 percent) and 13 of the 29 neonates assigned to receive phenytoin (45 percent; P=1.00). When combined treatment is considered, seizure control was achieved in 17 (57 percent) of the neonates assigned to receive phenobarbital first and 18 (62 percent) of those assigned to receive phenytoin first (P=0.67). The severity of the seizures was a stronger predictor of the success of treatment than was the assigned agent. Neonates with mild seizures or with seizures that were decreasing in severity before treatment were more likely to have their seizures end, regardless of the treatment assignment. CONCLUSIONS: Phenobarbital and phenytoin are equally but incompletely effective as anticonvulsants in neonates. With either drug given alone, the seizures were controlled in fewer than half of the neonates.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1056/nejm199908123410704

Cites

11 of 11 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 11 references

Cited by

See all 616

Metadata

Authors
Painter, M. J., Scher, M. S., Stein, A. D., Armatti, S., Wang, Z., Gardiner, J. C., Paneth, N., Minnigh, B., & Alvin, J.
Venue
New England Journal of Medicine
Published
1999-08-12
Volume
341
Issue
7
Pages
485-489
ISSN
  • 0028-4793 (ISSN-L)
  • 1533-4406
OpenAlex
W2322833765
Cited by
616
References
11
FWCI
5.26
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Phenobarbital Compared with Phenytoin for the Treatment of Neonatal Seizures. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1056/nejm199908123410704
The paper
Painter, M. J., Scher, M. S., Stein, A. D., Armatti, S., Wang, Z., Gardiner, J. C., Paneth, N., Minnigh, B., & Alvin, J. (1999). Phenobarbital Compared with Phenytoin for the Treatment of Neonatal Seizures. New England Journal of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm199908123410704

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.