Filed under: New Born — Alan @ 4:57 am
During Dafi Evans birth doctors used a form of superglue called Histoacryl to plug up a hole that had formed in his brain and would have caused his death within a few days of his birth.
The leak in his brain is part of a condition known as Vein of Galen malformation and is a condition in which the veins and arteries in the brain are missing capillaries that help increase the blood flow. As a result of the problem the brain is not able to absorb enough nutrients or oxygen.
Most of the time this leads to death due to stress on the heart or water that forms in the brain.
However, 16 months after his birth Dafi is now on par with a normal development path and his parents are sure that he was a miracle.
According to his mother, Catrin Evans, it is hard to look at Dafi now and believe that he is doing so well given that the operation was extremely dangerous but seemed so simple with only a simple cut required.
Evans first knew of the condition in her child when a scan showed that there was a dark patch on his brain and doctors informed her that there was not much hope her son would survive.
The procedure to seal the brain involves placing a catheter through the groin area and stringing it up to the brain area where the “superglue” is squeezed out.
Filed under: New Born — Alan @ 7:37 am
Although many people say babies are speaking baby talk while infants, studies state that their crying actually forms melodic patterns that resemble patterns found in adult conversation.
In a research study led by medical anthropologist Kathleen Werme and her team of colleagues at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, babies are able to form cries that resemble their parents’ language by just two to five days of age.
Each language and accent uses different melodies and pitch shifts to emphasize certain phrases and words with extra meaning. According to Wermke, a baby can hear what adults in their life are saying a few months before they are born thus training them to recreate the melodies they hear while in the womb.
Wermke continued to say that infant crying is the root of the beginning of language development since melody is the root of both the development of music and language.
Proposals by the team suggest that newborns are replicating the voice and melodies that are the most common in their mothers’ voice. After birth the researchers found that the babies offered some recognizable changes in melody that may reflect the language that was spoken prior to birth.
In order to compile data the research by Wemke and her team members included 60 healthy newborns half of which were French and the other half which were German.
Filed under: New Born — Alan @ 7:21 am
Babies born with oxygen starvation may now have a better chance against possible brain damage, this is due to a new therapy that lowers the baby’s body temperature, and thus, the babies the risk of brain damage is lowered.
Common birth complications that cause oxygen deprivation include the baby twisting the umbilical cord around its next, which happens in two births out of every thousand. The results of this devastating complication can be as severe as long lasting neurological problems, and cerebral palsy.
Traditionally, babies are placed into an incubator on a ventilator to facilitate breathing and to keep the child warm. But a newly published clinical trial shows, that lowering body temperatures may actually increase the long term outcomes of children facing oxygen deprivation.
The study included 325 newborn infants and showed that those who were cooled instead of warmed showed a 57% better chance of avoiding brain damage.
The principal of the study is based around the fact that lower temperatures lower the metabolism of the body. Lower temperatures create a longer window in which brain neurons can be deprived of oxygen, before they suffer irreparable damage.
Additionally, reducing the amount of oxygen metabolism that takes place in the body means that the oxygen is distributed to cells in a more efficient manner.
