Category Archives: Neonatal Research

Do preterm babies need their thyroid?

Posted on 7 April 2014 by Keith Barrington

Now I am very confused. I thought I knew that many very preterm babies had low serum thyroxine levels (this study confirms that). It seems to be a variant of sick euthyroid syndrome, levels tend to fall for about the … Continue reading →

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ETT position

Posted on 5 April 2014 by Keith Barrington

I was very fortunate to do my fellowship in neonatology with Neil Finer. One of the (very many) things which he taught me, about the 3rd day of the fellowship I think, was how to determine ETT position. He showed … Continue reading →

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Neonatal Updates

Posted on 2 April 2014 by Keith Barrington

Gephart SM, Spitzer AR, Effken JA, Dodd E, Halpern M, McGrath JM. Discrimination of GutCheckNEC: a clinical risk index for necrotizing enterocolitis. J Perinatol. 2014. The Pediatrix group have developed a scoring system for predicting the risk of NEC; points … Continue reading →

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Apneas are bad for you (probably), this might be part of the reason

Posted on 1 April 2014 by Keith Barrington

I have published two articles that looked a the relationship between apneas and long term outcome. One was taken from pre-discharge recordings of very preterm babies. We compared the long term neurodevelopmental abilities of preterm babies 18 months later, and … Continue reading →

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Oxygen, transfusions, and NEC

Posted on 31 March 2014 by Keith Barrington

What causes NEC! The answer is ‘who knows?’, or perhaps a better one would be ‘its complicated…’ You probably need an immature gut, gut mucosal injury, inflammation and cytokine release, and an abnormal microbiome, all of which probably interact in … Continue reading →

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Transfusion Associated Necrotizing EnteroColitis?

Posted on 29 March 2014 by Keith Barrington

I’m still not absolutely sure about TANEC, as it now seems to be called. It is certainly possible that transfusions could trigger gut injury in very preterm babies, but how to prove it? Even if the temporal association was absolutely … Continue reading →

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Septic Shock; 3 negative trials

Posted on 24 March 2014 by Keith Barrington

Three trials back to back in the PNEJM (that’s the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine for any new readers) in adults with septic shock are disappointing: Early Goal Directed Therapy has become a dogma in recent years; it even … Continue reading →

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Pressure-Volume loops are not consistently interpreted

Posted on 21 March 2014 by Keith Barrington

In case you remember my little Survey Monkey questionnaire on pressure volume loops, and were wondering about the responses, there were about 100 people who wasted a few minutes on the survey. Most were from medical professionals, (mostly neonatologists and … Continue reading →

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Publishing research results, can do better.

Posted on 21 March 2014 by Keith Barrington

Trial registration was supposed to reduce publication bias, and also improve the quality of publications. Ensuring that what investigators say they did, is what they actually did. Becker JE, Krumholz HM, Ben-Josef G, Ross JS. Reporting of results in ClinicalTrials.gov … Continue reading →

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Neonatal Updates : Therapeutic hypothermia

Posted on 21 March 2014 by Keith Barrington

Three recent articles dealing with the effects of therapeutic hypothermia: Drury PP, Gunn ER, Bennet L, Gunn AJ. Mechanisms of Hypothermic Neuroprotection. Clin Perinatol. 2014;41(1):161-75. the first is an excellent review article describing how hypothermia works, SPOILER ALERT, its mostly … Continue reading →

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