Tag Archives: Apnea

Do blood transfusions treat apnoea of prematurity?

Posted on 3 November 2025 by Keith Barrington

There has for a long time been a thought that anemic babies with many apnoeas could benefit from a blood transfusion which would decrease their apnoeic spells. This idea has never been directly tested by an RCT. That is, a … Continue reading →

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Caffeine is good for the preterm brain; might more caffeine be even better?

Posted on 24 September 2025 by Keith Barrington

One of the pivotal RCTs in neonatology was the CAP study (Schmidt B, et al. Long-term effects of caffeine therapy for apnea of prematurity. N Engl J Med. 2007;357(19):1893–902). We performed that study because there was no data on the … Continue reading →

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Neonatal Research Shorts : April 2025

Posted on 7 April 2025 by Keith Barrington

I used to do a series of shorter posts called “weekly updates” but I ran out of steam and have concentrated on longer posts in recent years. The last couple of weeks, with clinical service, I have had less time … Continue reading →

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Sending home preterm babies with Inguinal Hernias

Posted on 22 August 2024 by Keith Barrington

It has been dogma for quite some time that newborn preterm infants with Inguinal Hernias (I will resist the temptation to latinise the plural, although I was brought up hearing about ‘herniae’) should have them surgically fixed prior to discharge … Continue reading →

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What dose of caffeine to use?

Posted on 9 September 2022 by Keith Barrington

The dose of caffeine that we used for the CAP trial was the dose that was being widely used at the time. It seemed to be a safe dose, that did not require serum concentration surveillance, but was not based … Continue reading →

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PAS 2018: the wrap-up.

Posted on 14 May 2018 by Keith Barrington

A general comment about these PAS 2018 blog posts. I think we should be very careful about changing practice based on an abstract. We should respect peer review, with all its limitations, and we should always consider new research in … Continue reading →

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Shake it up baby

Posted on 9 April 2018 by Keith Barrington

When babies have respiratory pauses, the usual initial intervention is tactile stimulation of some kind. Which leads to a few questions: does it work? how does it work (if it does)? what mode of stimulation is most effective? If you … Continue reading →

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An Oldie but a Goodie

Posted on 25 November 2015 by Keith Barrington

I discovered several months ago that one of my older presentations is very difficult to get on-line. It seems that at some point, when this article, Barrington K, Finer N. The natural history of the appearance of apnea of prematurity. Pediatr … Continue reading →

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Oxygen is good for you

Posted on 28 August 2015 by Keith Barrington

Of course you can have too much of a good thing, but you should also try and stay above the minimum. The COT trial investigators, led by Christian Poets, have published a secondary analysis of the results, examining in particular … Continue reading →

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How should we feed preterm babies?

Posted on 8 September 2014 by Keith Barrington

Two new interesting articles to address this important question. Corvaglia, L., et al. (2014). “Cardiorespiratory Events with Bolus versus Continuous Enteral Feeding in Healthy Preterm Infants.” J Pediatr. The authors evaluated the effects of bolus vs continuous tube feeding in … Continue reading →

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