Author Archives: Keith Barrington

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About Keith Barrington

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

Death of a twin

Twins are much more likely to end up in the care of the NICU than singletons, and much more likely to be extremely preterm, and as a result the phenomenon of having one of twins die, while the other remains … Continue reading

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TPN toxic?

Humans, after they are born, are supposed to receive their nutrition via the gut. Before that of course, they receive a continuous infusion of nutrition via the umbilical vein. We are far from having an intravenous nutrition mixture for sick … Continue reading

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Neonatal Updates

Sehgal A, et al. Systemic arterial stiffness in infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia: potential cause of systemic hypertension. J Perinatol. 2016. Elevated systemic pressures are common in infants with moderate or severe BPD; why? Dr Sehgal and his colleagues performed vascular ultrasound … Continue reading

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Does erythropoietin improve preterm babies development?

Ohls RK, et al. Preschool Assessment of Preterm Infants Treated With Darbepoetin and Erythropoietin. Pediatrics. 2016;137(3):1-9. Robin Ohls has been working on Erythropoietin, and its longer acting analogue darbepoietin, for many years now. As well as demonstrating that it stimulates … Continue reading

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Early low dose systemic hydrocortisone to prevent death or chronic lung disease? Hold on a bit.

An important high quality trial has just been published, it has taken me a bit longer than usual to process the new info. Among other reasons a nice review was posted on the “other neonatal blog“, but I wanted to … Continue reading

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Lacuna trial now in print

Now available on-line the pilot trial of lactoferrin prophylaxis that I performed at Sainte Justine. (Barrington KJ, Assaad M-A, Janvier A. The Lacuna Trial: a double-blind randomized controlled pilot trial of lactoferrin supplementation in the very preterm infant. J Perinatol. … Continue reading

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Videolaryngoscopy to teach intubation

Two recent randomized trials, one from our group, and another one from Melbourne have evaluate the role of the videolaryngoscope (VL) in teaching trainees in neonatology to perform endotracheal intubations. The two trials are structured differently and tell us different … Continue reading

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Steroids directly in the lungs? Version 2

A couple of weeks ago I discussed a new multicenter RCT which examined the effects of multiple repeated doses of steroids, given by inhalation starting on the first day of life, and continuing, at least until the infants reached 14 … Continue reading

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Still more doubts about BOOSTing saturations?

I won’t make a point-by-point response to Reese’s comments, mostly because I agree with most of them! Oxygen is toxic. Minimizing oxygen toxicity is a vitally important issue. Alarm fatigue is a major problem. In our NICU we performed an … Continue reading

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All oscillators are equal, but some oscillators are more equal than others

My readers are a highly educated bunch and I am sure that the anglophones among you will recognize that title as a bastardized quotation from “Animal Farm”. Not my favorite of George Orwell, a bit too obvious as an analogy … Continue reading

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