Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is a devastating intestinal disease of premature infants. Epidermal growth factor (EGF) is one of the most promising candidates in NEC prophylaxis. Autophagy regulates cell homeostasis, but uncontrolled activation of autophagy may lead to cellular injury. The aim was to evaluate the effects of EGF on intestinal autophagy in epithelial cells and in the rat NEC mod...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the value of biomarkers to detect severe NEC. SUMMARY BACKGROUND DATA The time point of surgery in necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is critical. Therefore, there is a need for markers that detect severe NEC, because clinical signs of severe NEC often develop late. This study evaluated the value of biomarkers reflecting intestinal cell damage and inflammation to detect sev...

OBJECTIVE To reduce the incidence of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) among very low birth weight (VLBW) infants admitted to 8 intensive care nurseries from a 2010 baseline of 8.0% to <4.0% by 2012 and sustain for 6 months using quality improvement (QI) methodology. METHODS A multidisciplinary NEC QI team used the Vermont Oxford Network definition of NEC and the Institute for Healthcare Improv...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine the association between the number of nosocomial infections prior to necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) diagnosis as well as to evaluated how it contributed to development of NEC in premature infants. MATERIAL AND METHODS The study included 51 preterm infants diagnosed with NEC and 71 preterm infants without NEC hospitalized in the neonatal intens...

Energy conditions, especially the null energy condition (NEC), are generically imposed on solutions to retain a physically sensible classical field theory and they also play an important role in AdS/CFT duality. Using this duality, we study non-trivially deformed strongly coupled quantum theories at large-$N_c$. The corresponding dual gravity constructions entail use of radially non-monotonic D...

BACKGROUND Previous studies of infant fecal samples have failed to clarify the role of gut bacteria in the pathogenesis of NEC. We sought to characterize bacterial communities within intestinal tissue resected from infants with and without NEC. METHODS 26 intestinal samples were resected from 19 infants, including 16 NEC samples and 10 non-NEC samples. Bacterial 16S rRNA gene sequences were a...

Neonatal necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in premature infants. Oral administration of probiotics has been suggested as a promising strategy for prevention of NEC. However, little is known about the mechanism(s) of probiotic-mediated protection against NEC. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of Bifidobacterium bifidum treatment on develo...

Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is the most common gastrointestinal emergency and remains a major cause of mortality for very-low-birth-weight infants (VLBWI) requiring surgery. To date, there have been no large-scale studies evaluating the incidence, associated clinical factors and outcomes of NEC for VLBWI in Korea. The 2,326 VLBWI of a total 2,386 Korean Neonatal Network (KNN) cohort born wi...

background: necrotizing enterocolitis (nec) is one of the most destructive diseases associated with conditions of neonatal prematurity. supplementation with enteral prebiotics may reduce the incidence of nec, especially in infants who fed exclusively with breast-milk. therefore, we compared the efficacy and safety of enteral supplementation of a prebiotic mixture (short chain galacto-oligosacch...

Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is the most common gastrointestinal (GI) medical/surgical emergency of the newborn and a leading cause of preterm neonate morbidity and mortality. NEC is a challenge to diagnose since it often shares similar clinical features with neonatal sepsis. In the present study, plasma protein profiling was compared among NEC, sepsis and control cohorts using gel electroph...