PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

New innovation successfully treats neonatal hypothermia

2021-05-07
(Press-News.org) Neonatal hypothermia -- which occurs when an infant's core body temperature falls below the normal range needed to maintain health -- contributes to approximately one million deaths each year, and countless cases of stunted growth, almost exclusively in low- and middle-income countries. To address this common but preventable condition, researchers from Boston Children's Hospital, engineers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and colleagues in Rwanda developed the Dream Warmer, a low cost, reusable non-electric infant warmer to prevent and treat hypothermia. A new study from the team shows that infants who received treatment with the warmer had only an 11 percent rate of hypothermia compared to 29 percent of those who did not. Infant death rates also dropped, from 2.8 percent among infants who did not use the warmer to 0.9 percent of those who did. Results of the study were published in eClinicalMedicine from The Lancet.

"Infant hypothermia is a silent killer," says study leader Anne Hansen, MD, MPH of the Division of Newborn Medicine and Medical Director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Boston Children's, "but it's a modifiable risk factor, and this study shows that reducing it can have a large impact on survival and also likely on the long-term neurodevelopment of these babies."

Warmer was effective and safe The primary aim of the study was to see if the warmer increased body temperatures in infants who are hypothermic or at risk of hypothermia due to prematurity or low birth weight compared to the standard of care in rural Rwandan hospitals.

Over the study period from November 2019 to July 2020, 464 infants at ten of the largest neonatal wards in Rwandan district hospitals used the warmer 892 times. Data was also collected on over a thousand patients on the neonatal ward who did not receive the warmer.

The study found that: The rate of achieving a normal body temperature rose from 51 percent before introduction of the warmer to 67 percent after the warmer was introduced. Use of the warmer did not lead to an increased rate of excessively high core temperatures. The warmer caused no burns, rashes or other safety concerns, and no instances of incorrect warmer use were observed.

"This is a good option for treatment in setting where incubators are not the right solution, whether it is because they are too expensive, (about $100 compared with $5,000 for an incubator) require electricity, or require extensive training to correctly use and maintain," says Hansen, who adds that the warmer was specifically designed to complement skin-to-skin care, known as kangaroo mother care, either when it provides insufficient heat or if the mother needs to take a break. "And, the nurses needed only a couple minutes of training to prepare, use and clean it correctly because it is quite intuitive."

Ten years in the making Dr. Hansen has been working in Rwanda for more than a decade to address these and other preventable causes of infant disease and death. She teamed up with engineers from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop this low-cost, reusable infant warming mattress. The warmer contains 12 wax "candles" that are made of a material specially designed to melt at exactly skin temperature. When heated in boiled water, the candles melt and remain at body temperature for about six hours. Once they cool, the mattress can be cleaned and reused multiple times.

"The final design is a skin temperature heating pad that the infant can either lay on or be wrapped around the infant's back in addition to skin-to-skin care with the mother," says Hansen. Two smaller studies conducted by Hansen's team in Rwanda in 2016-2018 showed the warmer was effective, safe, and usable without needing an extensive training. "Because treating neonatal hypothermia is relatively easy given the appropriate equipment, we hope this warmer can play a significant role in optimizing the health of these vulnerable infants in low- and middle-income countries," says Hansen, who is now partnering with others with the goal of distributing the infant warmer across Sub Saharan Africa as well as Haiti and Chiapas, Mexico.

INFORMATION:

Hansen is senior investigator on the paper in The Lancet. Other researchers include Josee Uwamariya MGHD, Christian Mazimpaka MD, Alphonse Nshimyiryo MSc, and Evrard Nahimana MD of Partners In Health/Inshuti Mu Buzima, Kigali, Rwanda; Leana May DO of Children's Hospital of Colorado; Henry A Feldman PhD of Boston Children's; Felix Sayinzoga PhD, and Sharon Umutsei MPH of Rwanda Ministry of Health, Kigali Rwanda; Ashok Gadgil PhD and Vi H Rapp PhD of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The work was funded by the Banyan Gates Foundation.

About Boston Children's Hospital Boston Children's Hospital is ranked the #1 children's hospital in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and is the primary pediatric teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Home to the world's largest research enterprise based at a pediatric medical center, its discoveries have benefited both children and adults since 1869. Today, 3,000 researchers and scientific staff, including 9 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine and 12 Howard Hughes Medical Investigators comprise Boston Children's research community. Founded as a 20-bed hospital for children, Boston Children's is now a 415-bed comprehensive center for pediatric and adolescent health care. For more, visit our Discoveries blog and follow us on social media @BostonChildrens, @BCH_Innovation, Facebook and YouTube.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Why hotter clocks are more accurate

Why hotter clocks are more accurate
2021-05-07
A new experiment shows that the more energy consumed by a clock, the more accurate its timekeeping. Clocks pervade every aspect of life, from the atomic clocks that underlie satellite navigation to the cellular clocks inside our bodies. All of them consume energy and release heat. A kitchen clock, for example, does this by using up its battery. Generally the most accurate clocks require the most energy, which hints at a fundamental connection between energy consumption and accuracy. This is what an international team of scientists from Lancaster, Oxford, and Vienna set out to test. To do this, they built a particularly simple clock, consisting of a vibrating ultra-thin membrane, tens of nanometers ...

Skoltech scientists find a way to make pultrusion faster

Skoltech scientists find a way to make pultrusion faster
2021-05-07
A research team from the Skoltech Center for Design, Manufacturing and Materials (CDMM) studied the effects of processing additives - aluminum hydroxide and zinc stearate - on the polymerization kinetics of thermosets used in pultrusion. The research was published in the Journal of Composite Materials. Fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP) structural elements that have obvious advantages over conventional materials, such as steel, wood, and concrete, are widely used in civil, marine and road construction. FRP structures are manufactured using the pultrusion process, in which polymerization is achieved by continuously pulling ...

Damage to white matter is linked to worse cognitive outcomes after brain injury

2021-05-07
A new University of Iowa study challenges the idea that gray matter (the neurons that form the cerebral cortex) is more important than white matter (the myelin covered axons that physically connect neuronal regions) when it comes to cognitive health and function. The findings may help neurologists better predict the long-term effects of strokes and other forms of traumatic brain injury. "The most unexpected aspect of our findings was that damage to gray matter hubs of the brain that are really interconnected with other regions didn't really tell us much about how poorly people would do on cognitive tests after brain damage. On the other hand, people with damage to the densest white matter connections did much worse on those tests," explains Justin Reber, PhD, ...

Can federated learning save the world?

2021-05-07
Training the artificial intelligence models that underpin web search engines, power smart assistants and enable driverless cars, consumes megawatts of energy and generates worrying carbon dioxide emissions. But new ways of training these models are proven to be greener. Artificial intelligence models are used increasingly widely in today's world. Many carry out natural language processing tasks - such as language translation, predictive text and email spam filters. They are also used to empower smart assistants such as Siri and Alexa to 'talk' to us, and to operate driverless cars. But to function ...

Artificial intelligence makes great microscopes better than ever

Artificial intelligence makes great microscopes better than ever
2021-05-07
To observe the swift neuronal signals in a fish brain, scientists have started to use a technique called light-field microscopy, which makes it possible to image such fast biological processes in 3D. But the images are often lacking in quality, and it takes hours or days for massive amounts of data to be converted into 3D volumes and movies. Now, EMBL scientists have combined artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms with two cutting-edge microscopy techniques - an advance that shortens the time for image processing from days to mere seconds, while ensuring that the resulting images are crisp and accurate. The findings are published in Nature Methods. "Ultimately, we were able to take 'the best of both worlds' in this approach," says Nils Wagner, one of the paper's two lead ...

Discovery of a new genetic cause of hearing loss illuminates how inner ear works

2021-05-07
PHILADELPHIA-- A gene called GAS2 plays a key role in normal hearing, and its absence causes severe hearing loss, according to a study led by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers, whose findings are published online today in Developmental Cell, discovered that the protein encoded by GAS2 is crucial for maintaining the structural stiffness of support cells in the inner ear that normally help amplify incoming sound waves. They showed that inner ear support cells lacking functional GAS2 lose their amplifier abilities, causing severe hearing ...

How bullying and obesity can affect girls' and boys' mental health

2021-05-07
Depressive symptoms are more common in teenage girls than in their male peers. However, boys' mental health appears to be affected more if they suffer from obesity. Irrespective of gender, bullying is a considerably greater risk factor than overweight for developing depressive symptoms. These conclusions are drawn by researchers at Uppsala University who monitored adolescents for six years in a questionnaire study, now published in the Journal of Public Health. Peer-review/Observational study/People "The purpose of our study was to investigate the connection ...

Consumption of pornography is widespread among young Internet users

2021-05-07
Nearly four-fifths of 16- and 17-year-olds have encountered pornographic content on the Internet Pornography is a multibillion-dollar business. Pornographic content is virtually ubiquitous on the Internet, and surveys suggest that 25% of all searches lead to explicit content. Given the size of the market, it's not surprising that young people are drawn to such sites, which are only a couple of clicks away. Professor Neil Thurman of the Department of Media and Communication (IfKW) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich, in collaboration with statistician Fabian Obster (Universität der Bundeswehr München), has carried out a study on the use of pornographic sites by young people. Based on a survey involving a sample ...

Migratory songbirds climb to extreme altitudes during daytime

2021-05-07
Great reed warblers normally migrate by night during its month-long migration from northern Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa. However, researchers have now discovered that during the few occasions when it continues to fly during daytime, it flies at extremely high altitudes (up to 6300 meters). One possible explanation for this unexpected and consistent behaviour could be that the birds want to avoid overheating. The study is published in Science. Most of the many millions of songbirds that migrate every year between Europe and Africa fly by night and spend the daytime hours resting and eating. Some species, which normally only fly by night, occasionally fly for over 24 consecutive ...

Overcoming tab overload

2021-05-07
If you are reading this, chances are you have several other tabs open in your browser that you mean to get to eventually. Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand. A research team at Carnegie Mellon University recently completed the first in-depth study of browser tabs in more than a decade. They found that many people struggle with tab overload, an underlying reason being that while tabs serve a variety of functions, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Pavlov’s dogs were conditioned to go to their treat. Why do some animals learn to interact with the bell instead?

Call for Young Editorial Board members at Current Molecular Pharmacology

MSU team develops scalable climate solutions for agricultural carbon markets

Playing an instrument may protect against cognitive aging

UNM study finds link between Grand Canyon landslide and Meteor Crater impact

Ultra-hot Jupiter’s death spiral could reveal stellar secrets

You only get one brain! The best helmet material for protecting your noggin

Neurodegeneration and stroke after GLP-1RAs in diabetes and obesity

Pediatric COVID-19 hospitalization trends by race and ethnicity, 2020-2023

Research spotlight: New genetic roadmap offers insights into obesity and diabetes

Fred Hutch leads new Vanguard Study for Cancer Screening Research Network

‘Mismatched’ transplants now safe, effective for blood cancer patients, study finds

New research helps narrow down uncertainties in near-term precipitation projections for the Asian Water Tower

AI tool accurately detects tumor location on breast MRI

Researchers use OCT imaging to uncover how the fallopian tube transports embryos

PolyU secures RGC theme-based research scheme funding to develop cost-effective and sustainable Co-GenAI model

Van Andel Institute scientists develop technique for high-resolution single cell epigenetic analysis

The Lundquist Institute wins multi-year NIH grant exceeding $11 million to transform diagnosis and treatment of deadly mucormycosis

Review suggests ending adult boosters for tetanus, diphtheria

ESMT Berlin welcomes Rebecca Schaumberg to faculty

Blocking a little-known protein may offer new hope for devastating lung disease

Medieval medicine was smarter than you think – and weirdly similar to TikTok trends

FAU receives NIH grant to investigate amphetamine addiction

Realizing on-site carbon nanotube photo-thermoelectric imaging

Most of us love memes. But are they a form of comics?

Novel biosensor allows real-time monitoring of sucrose uptake in plants

Korea University researchers reveal revealing how WEE1 drives cancer resistance to immunotherapy

Pusan National University researchers develop breakthrough deep learning model that enhances handheld 3D medical imaging

SLAS Discovery and SLAS Technology demonstrate research impact with 2024 impact factors

Disease-causing bacteria can deal with stink as long as they get a meal

[Press-News.org] New innovation successfully treats neonatal hypothermia