Story first appeared in the Herald Tribune.
Infants born at the Women’s Center at Lakewood Ranch have a new line of defense against heart defects that can be linked to SIDS, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Parents now have the option to have a Pulse Oximetry, or “Pulse-Ox” test conducted on their newborn after the baby reaches 24 hours of life. The Pulse-Ox test identifies lower levels of oxygen which can be a sign of a congenital heart defect that is undetectable prior to the infant reaching 24 hours of life.
The Lakewood Ranch Medical Center Director of Inpatient Services said that this test will serve as an additional line of defense for newborns adapting to life outside of the womb. This way they can receive immediate medical intervention that can potentially save their lives.
The Pulse Oximetry test is conducted by placing a sticky strip, called a Pediatric Pulse Oximeter on the newborn baby’s hand or foot. The strip has a red flashing probe that measures oxygen levels in the baby’s blood.
The Pulse-Ox test compliments the array of services at the Women’s Center at Lakewood Ranch. The hospital features a NICU trained nursing staff, a full service nursery and around-the-clock neonatology services.
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Showing posts with label pediatric pulse oximeter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pediatric pulse oximeter. Show all posts
07 May 2012
International Rotary Helps Kids with Heart Defects
Story first appeared in The Kennebec Journal.
Two mothers from the Dominican Republic arrived at Portland's Ronald McDonald House on Tuesday morning, each carrying a baby girl who was born with a heart defect. Their daughters are scheduled to have surgery in about a week to fix a rare condition called tetralogy of fallot.
The operations at The Barbara Bush Children's Hospital at Maine Medical Center were arranged by Gift of Life, an international Rotary-affiliated program that connects children who have heart defects to the medical services they need.
Congenital heart defects can typically be recognized and diagnosed within days of birth, using Pediatric Pulse Oximeters.
Since 1974, more than 10,000 children have benefited from the program worldwide, none of them in Maine.
Tuesday's trip for the girls and their mothers, began with a 3 a.m. flight from the Dominican Republic. The arrangements were two years in the making.
The effort started when a member of the Westbrook-Gorham Rotary Club, attended a Rotary convention in Portsmouth, N.H., in 2010 and heard Gift of Life's first patient speak.
The member, whose grandchild died during surgery several years ago, was moved to bring the program to Maine. He approached Maine Medical Center in the fall, and the hospital agreed to participate.
Working with the New England chapter of Gift of Life, he was connected to the mothers, whose families met for the first time a few weeks ago in the Dominican Republic.
Soon after arriving in Portland on Tuesday, the mothers sat in the dining room at the Ronald McDonald House on Carleton Street, where they will stay while their daughters are in the hospital. They held the girls in their laps. The women spoke in Spanish through an interpreter. They were scared, they said, but excited.
Children born with tetralogy of fallot usually die by the age of 20, says the U.S. National Library of Medicine, but the success rate of the surgery is high.
The typical case includes a hole between the heart's left and right ventricles, a narrowing of the valve and artery that connect the heart with the lungs, a shifted aorta and a thickened wall of the right ventricle. This defect is likely to be located and diagnosed very early on in an infant's life if the proper tests are given using Pediatric Pulse Oximeters.
The defect causes low oxygen levels, which can lead to seizures and impede development.
Maine Medical Center has operated on 17 patients with tetralogy of fallot in the past year said a hospital spokesman. The hospital is waiving the medical costs for these young patients. Maine Medical Center provided more than $18.2 million worth of charity care last year, a small portion of which went to international patients.
American Airlines donated airfare for the mothers and daughters. So far, he has collected about $4,000 in donations, mostly from local Rotary clubs. He plans to raise another $6,000 to cover the cost of their stay, which could be a month or more, depending on how the girls recover from surgery.
For more healthcare and medical related news, visit the Healthcare and Medical blog.
For national and worldwide related business news, visit the Peak News Room blog.
For local and Michigan business related news, visit the Michigan Business News blog.
For law related news, visit the Nation of Law blog.
For real estate and home related news, visit the Commercial and Residential Real Estate blog.
For technology and electronics related news, visit the Electronics America blog.
For organic SEO and web optimization related news, visit the SEO Done Right blog.
Two mothers from the Dominican Republic arrived at Portland's Ronald McDonald House on Tuesday morning, each carrying a baby girl who was born with a heart defect. Their daughters are scheduled to have surgery in about a week to fix a rare condition called tetralogy of fallot.
The operations at The Barbara Bush Children's Hospital at Maine Medical Center were arranged by Gift of Life, an international Rotary-affiliated program that connects children who have heart defects to the medical services they need.
Congenital heart defects can typically be recognized and diagnosed within days of birth, using Pediatric Pulse Oximeters.
Since 1974, more than 10,000 children have benefited from the program worldwide, none of them in Maine.
Tuesday's trip for the girls and their mothers, began with a 3 a.m. flight from the Dominican Republic. The arrangements were two years in the making.
The effort started when a member of the Westbrook-Gorham Rotary Club, attended a Rotary convention in Portsmouth, N.H., in 2010 and heard Gift of Life's first patient speak.
The member, whose grandchild died during surgery several years ago, was moved to bring the program to Maine. He approached Maine Medical Center in the fall, and the hospital agreed to participate.
Working with the New England chapter of Gift of Life, he was connected to the mothers, whose families met for the first time a few weeks ago in the Dominican Republic.
Soon after arriving in Portland on Tuesday, the mothers sat in the dining room at the Ronald McDonald House on Carleton Street, where they will stay while their daughters are in the hospital. They held the girls in their laps. The women spoke in Spanish through an interpreter. They were scared, they said, but excited.
Children born with tetralogy of fallot usually die by the age of 20, says the U.S. National Library of Medicine, but the success rate of the surgery is high.
The typical case includes a hole between the heart's left and right ventricles, a narrowing of the valve and artery that connect the heart with the lungs, a shifted aorta and a thickened wall of the right ventricle. This defect is likely to be located and diagnosed very early on in an infant's life if the proper tests are given using Pediatric Pulse Oximeters.
The defect causes low oxygen levels, which can lead to seizures and impede development.
Maine Medical Center has operated on 17 patients with tetralogy of fallot in the past year said a hospital spokesman. The hospital is waiving the medical costs for these young patients. Maine Medical Center provided more than $18.2 million worth of charity care last year, a small portion of which went to international patients.
American Airlines donated airfare for the mothers and daughters. So far, he has collected about $4,000 in donations, mostly from local Rotary clubs. He plans to raise another $6,000 to cover the cost of their stay, which could be a month or more, depending on how the girls recover from surgery.
For more healthcare and medical related news, visit the Healthcare and Medical blog.
For national and worldwide related business news, visit the Peak News Room blog.
For local and Michigan business related news, visit the Michigan Business News blog.
For law related news, visit the Nation of Law blog.
For real estate and home related news, visit the Commercial and Residential Real Estate blog.
For technology and electronics related news, visit the Electronics America blog.
For organic SEO and web optimization related news, visit the SEO Done Right blog.
02 May 2012
Pulse Oximetry Screens for Congenital Heart Defects
Story first appeared on medpagetoday.com.
Pediatric Pulse Oximeters are a fairly accurate way to screen newborns for critical congenital heart defects, a meta-analysis determined.
The blood oxygenation sensor detected such defects with 76.5% sensitivity and 99.9% specificity, which compares favorably with other methods of detection such as antenatal ultrasound and routine physical exam.
The false-positive rate was low at just 0.14% across the pooled results reported online in The Lancet.
Those findings suggest newborn pulse oximetry meets criteria for universal screening, the researchers concluded. It has already been adopted into the recommended uniform newborn screening panel in the United States, though other countries have yet to follow.
Pulse oximetry itself isn't the issue, as the Pediatric Pulse Oximeter devices are widely available, testing is noninvasive and easy, and the cost per screen is low. Guaranteeing follow-up after a positive screen will be the biggest barrier to adoption of screening. Many hospitals do not have access to pediatric echocardiography, which is needed for newborn babies with a positive screen not attributable to another cause.
Anecdotal reports from New Jersey, which became the first state to implement pulse oximetry into state-wide newborn screening in mid-2011, suggest that those issues haven't been overly problematic and point to at least two unexpected defects being found.
It is expected that the debate about whether pulse oximetry screening should be part of newborn screening or clinical care to continue until we have better ways to assess explicitly the economic and health outcomes of each approach.
The meta-analysis tackled one aspect of that uncertainty through pooling accuracy results from 13 eligible studies with a total of 229,421 asymptomatic newborn babies.
Pulse oximetry done within 24 hours of birth, which was the case in six of the studies, didn't impact sensitivity for screening (P=0.36).
But it did affect the false-positive rate, which was especially low when done more than 24 hours after birth at 0.05%, compared with 0.50% when done sooner after delivery (P=0.0017).
That low rate would be important in keeping down costs for assessing test-positive infants, the researchers pointed out. This finding should be balanced against the increasing tendency of many countries to discharge babies early (between 6 and 24 hours), and the risk of infants with serious disorders deteriorating before screening has been done.
The site where oxygen saturation was measured didn't appear to make a difference in sensitivity either, comparing results in the 60% of studies that used the foot alone versus those of the rest testing both the right hand and foot (P=0.22).
False-positive rates also did not differ significantly by probe positioning (P=0.66).
Most studies excluded newborns with antenatal suspicion of congenital heart defects, but those that included them had higher false-positive rates (P<0.0001) without much boost in sensitivity of pulse oximetry (P=0.18).
For more healthcare and medical related news, visit the Healthcare and Medical blog.
For national and worldwide related business news, visit the Peak News Room blog.
For local and Michigan business related news, visit the Michigan Business News blog.
For law related news, visit the Nation of Law blog.
For real estate and home related news, visit the Commercial and Residential Real Estate blog.
For technology and electronics related news, visit the Electronics America blog.
For organic SEO and web optimization related news, visit the SEO Done Right blog.
Pediatric Pulse Oximeters are a fairly accurate way to screen newborns for critical congenital heart defects, a meta-analysis determined.
The blood oxygenation sensor detected such defects with 76.5% sensitivity and 99.9% specificity, which compares favorably with other methods of detection such as antenatal ultrasound and routine physical exam.
The false-positive rate was low at just 0.14% across the pooled results reported online in The Lancet.
Those findings suggest newborn pulse oximetry meets criteria for universal screening, the researchers concluded. It has already been adopted into the recommended uniform newborn screening panel in the United States, though other countries have yet to follow.
Pulse oximetry itself isn't the issue, as the Pediatric Pulse Oximeter devices are widely available, testing is noninvasive and easy, and the cost per screen is low. Guaranteeing follow-up after a positive screen will be the biggest barrier to adoption of screening. Many hospitals do not have access to pediatric echocardiography, which is needed for newborn babies with a positive screen not attributable to another cause.
Anecdotal reports from New Jersey, which became the first state to implement pulse oximetry into state-wide newborn screening in mid-2011, suggest that those issues haven't been overly problematic and point to at least two unexpected defects being found.
It is expected that the debate about whether pulse oximetry screening should be part of newborn screening or clinical care to continue until we have better ways to assess explicitly the economic and health outcomes of each approach.
The meta-analysis tackled one aspect of that uncertainty through pooling accuracy results from 13 eligible studies with a total of 229,421 asymptomatic newborn babies.
Pulse oximetry done within 24 hours of birth, which was the case in six of the studies, didn't impact sensitivity for screening (P=0.36).
But it did affect the false-positive rate, which was especially low when done more than 24 hours after birth at 0.05%, compared with 0.50% when done sooner after delivery (P=0.0017).
That low rate would be important in keeping down costs for assessing test-positive infants, the researchers pointed out. This finding should be balanced against the increasing tendency of many countries to discharge babies early (between 6 and 24 hours), and the risk of infants with serious disorders deteriorating before screening has been done.
The site where oxygen saturation was measured didn't appear to make a difference in sensitivity either, comparing results in the 60% of studies that used the foot alone versus those of the rest testing both the right hand and foot (P=0.22).
False-positive rates also did not differ significantly by probe positioning (P=0.66).
Most studies excluded newborns with antenatal suspicion of congenital heart defects, but those that included them had higher false-positive rates (P<0.0001) without much boost in sensitivity of pulse oximetry (P=0.18).
For more healthcare and medical related news, visit the Healthcare and Medical blog.
For national and worldwide related business news, visit the Peak News Room blog.
For local and Michigan business related news, visit the Michigan Business News blog.
For law related news, visit the Nation of Law blog.
For real estate and home related news, visit the Commercial and Residential Real Estate blog.
For technology and electronics related news, visit the Electronics America blog.
For organic SEO and web optimization related news, visit the SEO Done Right blog.
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