Sildenafil in Pulmonary Hypertension Associated with Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia: Friend or Foe?

Introduction: Sildenafil is a phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitor used to treat pulmonary hypertension, although its efficiency remains disputed in the neonatal population. We aimed to assess the clinical use of this drug in extremely premature infants diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension associated to bronchopulmonary dysplasia.

Study Design: This is a retrospective study of 18 patients born at ≤ 32 weeks gestational age with pulmonary hypertension complicating moderate to severe bronchopulmonary dysplasia, which was diagnosed on echocardiography at 36 weeks corrected gestational age.

Pulmonary hypertension in preterm infants with moderate-to-severe bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD).

Aim: To describe clinical characteristics of pulmonary hypertension (PH) associated with moderate to severe BPD (MSBPD) in premature infants born ≤32 weeks gestation.

Methods: This was a single centre retrospective cohort study, with reanalysis of echocardiographic studies for PH of infants born ≤32 weeks gestation with MSBPD admitted to a tertiary surgical neonatal service.

Results: In total, 268 babies with MSBPD were included in the study.

Non-immune fetal hydrops: etiology and outcome according to gestational age at diagnosis.

Objective: Fetal hydrops is associated with increased perinatal morbidity and mortality. The etiology and outcome of fetal hydrops may differ according to the gestational age at diagnosis. The aim of this study was to evaluate the cause, evolution and outcome of non-immune fetal hydrops (NIFH), according to the gestational age at diagnosis.

Solutions for medical databases optimal exploitation.

The paper discusses the methods to apply OLAP techniques for multidimensional databases that leverage the existing, performance-enhancing technique, known as practical pre-aggregation, by making this technique relevant to a much wider range of medical applications, as a logistic support to the data warehousing techniques. The transformations have practically low computational complexity and they may be implemented using standard relational database technology. The paper also describes how to integrate the transformed hierarchies in current OLAP systems, transparently to the user and proposes a flexible, "multimodel" federated system for extending OLAP querying to external object databases.