Author Archives: keithbarrington

About keithbarrington

I am a neonatologist and clinical researcher at Sainte Justine University Health Center in Montréal

Neonatal Updates

Posted on 18 October 2021 by keithbarrington

It’s a long time since I did one of these, but there were several publications that I thought warranted a quick comment. Abbey NV, et al. Electrocardiogram for heart rate evaluation during preterm resuscitation at birth: a randomized trial. Pediatr … Continue reading →

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Delivering better CPAP in the delivery room, can we avoid intubation in the most immature babies?

Posted on 7 October 2021 by keithbarrington

Randomized trials have shown that trying to prevent intubation in the DR leads to less severe lung injury. The Cochrane review of prophylactic CPAP compared to immediate intubation included 3 trials (SUPPORT, COIN and DR Management study), that review found … Continue reading →

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Babies feel pain, and they remember it!

Posted on 6 October 2021 by keithbarrington

I usually don’t post about studies of painful procedures where there was no analgesic prophylaxis in some of the the subjects, except to criticize them, and if they are recent, to call for their retraction. So when I first saw … Continue reading →

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Intestinal perforation in the very preterm, what causes it, and what to do about it.

Posted on 24 September 2021 by keithbarrington

There are 2 main causes of intestinal perforation in the very preterm, Necrotising Enterocolitis and Spontaneous Perforation. NEC, as I have previously discussed, may be a convenient name for a few different conditions which present in a similar fashion. In … Continue reading →

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Extreme preterm survival and outcomes

Posted on 16 September 2021 by keithbarrington

There are frequently publications about the outcomes of extreme preterm infants; as a community I think we should be proud of our investment in outcome research. Indeed, neonatologists invented the entire field of outcomes research (Barrington KJ, Saigal S. Long-term … Continue reading →

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Opioid infusions for ventilated preterm babies

Posted on 13 September 2021 by keithbarrington

Many practices in neonatology are variable between NICUs, and many vary from year to year; without any good scientific data practices become fashionable or routine or ingrained without necessarily having an evidence base to support them. One such practice is … Continue reading →

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Drug use and abuse in the NICU

Posted on 2 September 2021 by keithbarrington

The title does not refer to”drugs of abuse” but rather to how we use and choose medications for use in newborns, particularly the very immature. A new publication has just appeared on-line which focuses of medication use in the NICU, … Continue reading →

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Pain studies with untreated control groups in babies are unethical.

Posted on 19 August 2021 by keithbarrington

If you are performing a study of pain control in the newborn and you assign babies to untreated controls, you are creating unnecessary avoidable pain in the control patients. That is true for any patient who is incompetent, obviously including … Continue reading →

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Plug the Lung Until it Grows: the FETO RCTs of antenatal diaphragmatic hernia intervention.

Posted on 18 August 2021 by keithbarrington

What was at one time called PLUG, and, with the change from open to endoscopic intervention, is now called FETO (fetal endoscopic tracheal occlusion) is a way to harness the normal physiology of the lung in congential diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) … Continue reading →

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What is critical in a “critical sample”?

Posted on 17 August 2021 by keithbarrington

It is common practice in the evaluation of neonatal hypoglycaemic episodes, especially if unusual or prolonged, to perform a “critical sample”. This is performed to rule out underlying metabolic or endocrine disorders. But what should the critical sample consist of? … Continue reading →

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