Category Archives: Neonatal Research

Neonatal Surgery and Long Term Outcomes

A study from a group in Australia provides new data about the developmental outcomes of babies having surgery, in the medium long term. It is already clear that babies who need neonatal cardiac surgery have poorer developmental outcomes than control … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Tagged | Leave a comment

Septic Shock

This study is not neonatal at all, not even pediatric, but I think it is really important. Ranieri VM, Thompson BT, Barie PS, Dhainaut JF, Douglas IS, Finfer S, et al. Drotrecogin Alfa (Activated) in Adults with Septic Shock. N … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Tagged , | Leave a comment

15,000,000 preterm babies a year

A new report from the World Health Organisation highlights the importance of prematurity as a major health problem around the world. http://www.who.int/pmnch/media/news/2012/preterm_birth_report/en/index.html Fifteen million babies are born prematurely in the world each year, and the number is increasing everywhere. You can use … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Pulse Oximetry Screening for Congenital Heart Disease, an idea whose time has come

It is now several years since the first study of using pulse oximeters to screen for congenital heart disease were published. The initial response was a little skeptical, and appropriately cautious. It was immediately clear that there would be numerous false positives … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Tagged | Leave a comment

Weaning from CPAP in preterm babies

There have been very few studies of how to wean babies from CPAP, even though it is something we do all the time. A recent tendency, which seems to have arisen without any supportive data, and which never made much sense … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Encephalopathy and induced hypothermia

The widespread use of therapeutic hypothermia for infants with encephalopathy has raised several questions. Prior to this new(ish) technique, the neurological examination of the infant was thought to have a reasonably good predictive accuracy for long term outcomes. Infants who were never … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Tagged | Leave a comment

Assisted Reproduction and Neonatology

Assisted Reproductive Technologies have a number of impacts on Neonatology. By far the most important is the increased risk of prematurity due to multiple gestation. In the USA and Canada (outside of Quebec) the frequency of multiple gestation among IVF … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Leave a comment

Hypocapnia in asphyxiated infants

Some of my posts are not necessarily going to be about very new publications, sometimes a clinical event or question stimulates me to review the literature, and I will share my findings with the readers. Spontaneous hypocapnia is not rare … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Tagged | Leave a comment

Predicting outcomes in extremely preterm infants

Extremely preterm infants (less than 28 weeks gestation) have an increased risk of adverse neurological or developmental outcomes. A new publication from the University of Chicago emphasizes a feature that has been shown before. That among survivors, there is little difference in … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Tagged | Leave a comment

Hand washing

Sometimes our discussion of infection control become somewhat theoretical, we talk about frequencies and methodologies. Here are a sequence of images that are worth a thousand words. the first 2 are from a publication in the New England Journal of … Continue reading

Posted in Neonatal Research | Tagged | Leave a comment