ArticlePeerJ2013
What is the "normal" fetal heart rate?
Article in PeerJ, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT04043299 (Birth Asphyxia in Uganda), which is not on this map. Cited by 58 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Birth Asphyxia in Uganda: Prevalence, Associated Factors and Effect of Intrapartum Oxygen Administration on Fetal and Early Neonatal Outcomes
Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 136 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effect of external airflow resistive load on postural and exercise-associated cardiovascular and pulmonary responses in pregnancy: a case control study.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2015Trial
- Development of a hybrid manikin for extra-uterine life support technology innovation.BMC biomedical engineering · 2026Article
- Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) for Low-Latency Real-Time Cardiac MRI.Magnetic resonance in medicine · 2026Article
- FOSTER: A Comprehensive Pipeline for Transabdominal Fetal Pulse Oximetry Validated in a Large Animal Model of Pregnancy.IEEE transactions on bio-medical engineering · 2026Article
- Fetal monitoring for high-risk pregnancies using a wearable ultrasound patch.Nature biotechnology · 2026Article
- Involving mothers in monitoring their unborn babies during labour: experience from Liberia.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2026Article
- HDFusion: Hierarchical Data Fusion for Robust Fetal Heart Rate Estimation using Transabdominal PPG Signals.ACM transactions on computing for healthcare · 2026Article
- Online Spatiotemporally Constrained Reconstruction for Real-Time Interactive MRI.Magnetic resonance in medicine · 2026Article
- Fetal monitoring using a wearable ultrasound patch for high-risk pregnancies.Research square · 2025Article
- Fetal Supraventricular Tachycardia: What Do We Know up to This Day?Journal of personalized medicine · 2025Review
- Fetal Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance: History, Current Status, and Future Directions.Journal of magnetic resonance imaging : JMRI · 2025Review
- Fetal Health Prediction From Cardiotocography Recordings Using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks.IEEE open journal of engineering in medicine and biology · 2025Article
- Early-Stage Prototype Assessment of Cost-Effective Non-Intrusive Wearable Device for Instant Home Fetal Movement and Distress Detection: A Pilot Study.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Transcutaneous Discrimination of Fetal Heart Rate from Maternal Heart Rate: A Fetal Oximetry Proof-of-Concept.Reproductive sciences (Thousand Oaks, Calif.) · 2024Article
- Evaluation of fetal cardiac morphology and function by fetal heart quantification technique in the normal second and third trimesters.Translational pediatrics · 2024Article
- Diagnosis and Management of Fetal Arrhythmias in the Current Era.Journal of cardiovascular development and disease · 2024Review
- Versatile human cardiac tissues engineered with perfusable heart extracellular microenvironment for biomedical applications.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Fetal ECG-based analysis reveals the impact of fetal movements and maternal respiration on maternal-fetal heart rate synchronization.PloS one · 2024Article
- Fetal cardiovascular blood flow MRI: techniques and applications.The British journal of radiology · 2023Review
- Fetal to Neonatal Heart Rate Transition during Normal Vaginal Deliveries: A Prospective Observational Study.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Aim. There is no consensus about the normal fetal heart rate. Current international guidelines recommend for the normal fetal heart rate (FHR) baseline different ranges of 110 to 150 beats per minute (bpm) or 110 to 160 bpm. We started with a precise definition of "normality" and performed a retrospective computerized analysis of electronically recorded FHR tracings. Methods. We analyzed all recorded cardiotocography tracings of singleton pregnancies in three German medical centers from 2000 to 2007 and identified 78,852 tracings of sufficient quality. For each tracing, the baseline FHR was extracted by eliminating accelerations/decelerations and averaging based on the "delayed moving windows" algorithm. After analyzing 40% of the dataset as "training set" from one hospital generating a hypothetical normal baseline range, evaluation of external validity on the other 60% of the data was performed using data from later years in the same hospital and externally using data from the two other hospitals. Results. Based on the training data set, the "best" FHR range was 115 or 120 to 160 bpm. Validation in all three data sets identified 120 to 160 bpm as the correct symmetric "normal range". FHR decreases slightly during gestation. Conclusions. Normal ranges for FHR are 120 to 160 bpm. Many international guidelines define ranges of 110 to 160 bpm which seem to be safe in daily practice. However, further studies should confirm that such asymmetric alarm limits are safe, with a particular focus on the lower bound, and should give insights about how to show and further improve the usefulness of the widely used practice of CTG monitoring.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.