What is it about?
There were 104 babies with a birth weight of 500g or less over 15 years. They had only around a 1 in 10 chance of surviving. The survivors had significant rates of eye problems (retinopathy of prematurity) and long term lung damage (chronic lung disease).
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Why is it important?
Babies with a birth weight of 500g or less present a special challenge on account of their size, regardless of how early they are born. It is therefore important to know how they turn out in order to provide accurate information for parents when it is know that their baby is likely to weigh less than 500g at birth.
Perspectives
Rates of survival for babies born at 23 weeks have improved dramatically over the same time period, so why has this not been the case for very small babies of 500g or less? It might be that most of these very tiny babies are severely growth restricted in utero and therefore physiologically less likely to survive. It may be that the technical challenges they pose in relation to managing intravenous feeding and ventilation mean that they are at much higher risk of death than bigger babies. And it may also be that if the attending doctors have a prior belief that they will not survive, a higher proportion may be given comfort care, rather than intensive care, after delivery. The results of this study can only raise the questions, but not answer them.
Dr Martin Peter Ward Platt
Newcastle University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Outcomes of infants with a birthweight less than or equal to 500 g in Northern England: 15 years experience, Acta Paediatrica, September 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/apa.14024.
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