BACKGROUND/PURPOSE Children suffering from abusive head trauma (AHT) have worse outcomes compared to non-AHT, but the reasons for this are unclear. We hypothesized that delayed medical care associated with AHT causes prolonged pre-hospital hypotension and hypoxia as measured by admission base deficit (BD), and that this would correlate with outcome. METHODS We performed a 10-year retrospectiv...

The cardiovascular and acid-base changes following equivalent i.v. bolus doses of sodium nitroprusside (SNP) and potassium cyanide (KCN) have been studied in two groups of anaesthetized dogs. In a third group, the metabolic changes produced by i.v. infusion of SNP 1.5 mg kg-1 at a constant rate over 1 h have been studied. In contrast to a decrease in arterial pressure following SNP, hypertensio...

Umbilical cord blood gas and acid-base assessment are the most objective determinations of the fetal metabolic condition at the moment of birth. Moderate and severe newborn encephalopathy, respiratory complications, and composite complication scores increase with an umbilical arterial base deficit of 12-16 mmol/L. Moderate or severe newborn complications occur in 10% of neonates who have this l...

The introduction of the micro-Astrup technique (Siggaard Andersen, Engel, J0rgensen, and Astrup, 1960) with the subsequent modification of the nomogram (Siggaard Andersen, 1962) has given a rapid and simple method for separating the respiratory and metabolic components of acid-base equilibrium in the blood. Arterialized capillary blood from a heel stab has been used for the estimation ofpH and ...