The study focuses on the positive effects of inhaled nitric oxide for the treatment of HRF and reveals a rarity in today's world of rising medical costs: a breakthrough treatment that benefits patients and is less expensive than the standard treatment.
"It's almost unprecedented to hear of an advanced medication that actually saves money compared with an older treatment," said Derek C. Angus, M.D., the study's lead author and director of the Clinical Research, Investigation and Systems Modeling of Acute Illness (CRISMA) laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. "When you are treating a critically ill baby, you want the best treatment available no matter what the cost. It's heartening to learn that in the case of babies with hypoxic respiratory failure, we can offer state-of-the-art treatment that improves outcomes in comparison to traditional care and does so at potentially reduced costs overall."
HRF develops in newborns whose lungs cannot deliver enough oxygen to their bodies, causing them to appear bluish and endangering their lives. The condition often appears on the first day after birth, and affects about 30,000 full-term and near-term infants each year. There is no prenatal test or other way to predict which infants will develop HRF, so there is no known way to prevent the condition.
In the past, the only effective treatment for newborns with HRF who did not respond to standard care was an invasive surgical procedure known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), which involves cutting a newborn's jugular vein and putting the baby on a heart-lung machine to oxygenate the blood. Besides being invasive,
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Contact: Todd Ringler
todd.ringler@edelman.com
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Edelman Public Relations
8-Dec-2003