Richburg DA, Kim JH: Real-time bowel ultrasound to characterize intestinal motility in the preterm neonate. J Perinatol 2013. You can quantify intestinal motility with bed-side ultrasound. Neat. Now we need to know what to do with the information, sounds like Jae Kim is already looking into that.

Boss RD, Urban A, Barnett MD, Arnold RM: Neonatal critical care communication (nc3): Training nicu physicians and nurse practitioners. J Perinatol 2013. This is addressing a real need, how to teach neonatal health care providers to talk to parents. It sounds like they have a good system, the trainees felt more comfortable, and used the skills taught frequently. What we don’t know is whether the parents were better informed, felt more comfortable etc.

Cremer M, Weimann A, Szekessy D, Hammer H, Buhrer C, Dame C: Low immature platelet fraction suggests decreased megakaryopoiesis in neonates with sepsis or necrotizing enterocolitis. J Perinatol 2013. So where do the platelets go to? It happens quite often that the platelet count gets very low during sepsis or NEC, this study suggests that they aren’t being consumed, rather, usually they are not being produced. I don’t know if my lab can measure this feature of the platelets, it sounds a bit complex, but then most of what they do in the lab sounds complex to me.

Slaughter JL, Stenger MR, Reagan PB: Variation in the use of diuretic therapy for infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Pediatrics 2013. This database study looks at diuretic use in infants with BPD. There are enormous differences, ranging from a hospital that gives about 62% of the babies occasional short courses of less than 5 days, but rarely gives more than 5 days, to one hospital where over 80% of the babies get both long and short courses. I guess as usual that means we need some good data.