Tag Archives: Sepsis

I might have already mentioned this; CRPs are CRaP!

Acute phase reactants increase for many different reasons, such as being born. Other causes of increased CRP include maternal antibiotic prophylaxis, TTN, HMD, Surfactant treatment, meconium aspiration syndrome, prolonged rupture of membranes, HIE, higher birthweight, gastroschisis, and probably someone scowling … Continue reading

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It’s Raining Antibiotics

Early onset sepsis is a serious condition with a substantial morbidity, and, thankfully, a relatively low mortality in recent years. Prompt recognition and early treatment are essential, but early clinical signs and risk factors tend to be non-specific. As a … Continue reading

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Survival and outcomes for the extremely preterm. The NICHD network results continue to improve: Can we do even better?

A new publication from the NRN describes short term outcomes and care practices of babies from 22 to 28 weeks gestation born in recent years (2013 to 2018) and for those born in 2013-2016 results of evaluations of those followed … Continue reading

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Probiotics in preterms; what’s new? Part 2

Rao S, et al. Probiotic supplementation in neonates with congenital gastrointestinal surgical conditions: a pilot randomised controlled trial. Pediatr Res. 2022. When we started using probiotics there had been a couple of case reports of probiotic associated sepsis in infants … Continue reading

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Neonatal Updates

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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What happened to the HeROs?

I had to find a way of changing HeRO to Heroes as an excuse for posting a link to this video But also the results of a long term follow up of the HeRO trial have been published. The original … Continue reading

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CRP can suggest that babies are not infected, when you already know!

I wrote a blog post about 3 years ago about a study examining procalcitonin use in neonatal early-onset sepsis. You can see from my post that the authors didn’t, to my mind, show any utility of procalcitonin (PCT) either alone … Continue reading

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Lactoferrin: Does it decrease late-onset sepsis?

The first multicentre trial of bovine lactoferrin supplementation in preterm infants showed a dramatic reduction in late-onset sepsis of about 70%. I was very excited when I first saw Paolo Manzoni’s trial and rushed to set up a pilot in … Continue reading

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Screening for early-onset neonatal sepsis in the UK. NICE or not?

Evaluating a screening procedure for a rare serious phenomenon, such as early-onset neonatal sepsis, is tricky. A perfect screening process would catch all of the cases that require treating at an early stage and would be completely specific, thus eliminating … Continue reading

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Linezolid seems safe for preterms, probably

A few years ago we started having difficulty clearing Coagulase-Negative Staphylococcal (CoNS) sepsis from the blood cultures of some babies in our NICU, children with CoNS also seemed to be sicker, and to more often have thrombocytopenia. It was at … Continue reading

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