In this 50th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) it is appropriate to call for fairness in the allocation of resources to prevail on behalf of extremelylow-birth-weight (ELBW) infants weighing between 800 and 1 000 g or of a gestational age (GA) of 27 28 weeks. The Writing Group for the Consortium for Health and Human Rights recently invited institutions that te...

In 1977, the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Nutrition first stated that the goal of nutritional management of VLBW infants should be to permit the rate of extrauterine growth and the composition of weight gain to approximate that of a normal fetus of the same postmenstrual age, if the infant had remained in utero(1). However, it has become clear that such a goal is more often not r...

OBJECTIVE To assess the quality of general movements (GMs) in the first fourteen days of life in relation to obstetric and postnatal risk factors and neurodevelopmental outcome in extremely low birth weight (ELBW) infants. STUDY DESIGN The GMs of nineteen infants were assessed on days 2, 4, 6, 10 and 14 with Prechtl's method. Additionally, detailed GM assessment produced optimality scores (OS...

Forty-five children born extremely preterm and/or with extremely low birth weight (ELBW), who were of average intelligence, were assessed at age 7-9 on a raft of measures of executive function (EF) designed to assess inhibition, set shifting, planning, fluency, and working memory. Relative to 45 full-term controls, the preterm/ELBW children showed reliable impairments of inhibition, fluency, an...

OBJECTIVE To examine factors affecting center differences in mortality for extremely low birth weight (ELBW) infants. METHODS We analyzed data for 5418 ELBW infants born at 16 Neonatal Research Network centers during 2006-2009. The primary outcomes of early mortality (≤12 hours after birth) and in-hospital mortality were assessed by using multilevel hierarchical models. Models were developed ...

We report a case of an extremely low birth weight (ELBW) infant presenting with pulmonary hemorrhage (PH) in which we have given surfactant after an acute episode of bleeding with severe intractable hypoxemia. Surfactant replacement therapy showed improvement in Mean Airway Pressure (MAP) and oxygenation indices. Our case suggests that surfactant replacement therapy is useful in PH.

The 80% of bone mineralisation occurs in the third trimester of pregnancy. The daily fetal requirement is 310 mg of calcium and 170 mg of phosphorus [1]. The bone mineral density (BMD) correlates positively with gestational age, weight and length [2]. At birth, extremely premature infants (ELBWI)canpresent hypocalcaemia because of interruption of the maternal calcium supply, high level of calci...

Hypothyroxinemia of prematurity (HOP) is a transient alteration in thyroid hormone availabilityfound in more than half of extremely low birth weight infants (ELBW) born at less than 30 weeks [1]. HOP is characterized by very low total T4 (TT4) and free T4 (FT4) levels with a normal or low thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH); TT4 and FT4 show a nadir at 7-10 days of life and they may remained low ...