Volume guarantee versus high-frequency ventilation: lung inflammation in preterm infants.

Background: Appropriate ventilation together with improvement of clinical care of premature babies can contribute to reducing lung inflammation, known to represent the "primum movens" of bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). High-frequency oscillatory ventilation (HFOV) and volume-guarantee (VG) ventilation are effective in the treatment of neonatal respiratory distress syndrome (RDS).

Objective: To assess the potential of HFOV and VG to prevent BPD in the acute phase of RDS, by a randomised clinical study evaluating lung inflammation in premature infants.

Assessing mortality risk in very low birthweight infants: a comparison of CRIB, CRIB-II, and SNAPPE-II.

Background: Illness severity scores are increasingly used for risk adjustment in clinical research and quality assessment. Recently, a simplified version of the score for neonatal acute physiology (SNAPPE-II) and a revised clinical risk index for babies (CRIB-II) score have been published.

Aim: To compare the discriminatory ability and goodness of fit of CRIB, CRIB-II, and SNAPPE-II in a cohort of neonates < 1500 g birth weight (VLBWI).

Inhibition of in vitro adherence of antibody-coated red cells to monocytes by the dialyzable leukocyte extract.

The red cell-monocyte assay (RMA), which has been used to evaluate the clinical significance of red cell (RBC) antibodies, was employed to test the effect of the dialyzable leukocyte extract (DLE) on in vitro adherence to monocytes of human RBCs coated with alloantibodies or autoantibodies. The total association index (TAI) of the RMA, expressing the number of RBCs adhering to or phagocytosed by 100 monocytes, indicated a potent inhibitory activity of DLE in the test system. TAI values of 100.