I know how to bag a baby.  At least I think I do.  Providing PPV with a bag-valve mask is something that you are taught in NRP and is likely one of the first skills you learned in the NICU.  We are told to squeeze the bag at a rate of 40-60 breaths a minute.  According to the Laerdal website, the volume of the preterm silicone bag that we typically use is 240 mL.  Imagine then that you are wanting to ventilate a baby who is 1 kg.  How much should you compress the bag if you wish to delivery 5 mL/kg.  Five ml out of a 240 mL bag is not a lot of squeeze is it?  Think about that the next time you find yourself squeezing one.  You might then say but what about a t-piece resuscitator?  A good choice option as well but how much volume are you delivering if you set the initial pressures at 20/5 for example?  That would depend on the compliance of the lung of course.  The greater the compliance the more volume would go in. Would it be 5 mL, 10 ml or even 2.5 mL based on the initial setting?  Hard to say as it really depends on your seal and the compliance of the lung at the pressure you have chosen.  If only we had a device that could deliver a preset volume just like on a ventilator with a volume guarantee setting!

Why is this holy grail so important?

It has been over 30 years since the importance of volutrauma was demonstrated in a rabbit model. Hernandez LA et al published Chest wall restriction limits high airway pressure-induced lung injury in young rabbits. The study used three models to demonstrate the impact of volume as opposed to pressure on injuring the lung of preterm rabbits.  Group 1 were rabbit ventilated at pressures of 15/30/45 cm H2O for one hour, group 2 rabbits with a cast around their thorax to limit volume expansion and group 3 sets of excised lungs with no restriction to distension based on the applied pressures.  As you might expect, limitation of over distension by the plaster cast led the greatest reduction in injury (measured as microvascular permeability) with the excised lungs being the worst.  In doing this study the authors demonstrated the importance of over distension and made the case for controlling volume more than pressure when delivering breaths to avoid excessive tidal volume and resultant lung injury.

The “Next Step” Volume Ventilator BVM

Perhaps I am becoming a fan of the Edmonton group.  In 2015 they published A Novel Prototype Neonatal Resuscitator That Controls Tidal Volume and Ventilation Rate: A Comparative Study of Mask Ventilation in a Newborn Manikin.  The device is tablet based and as described, rather than setting a PIP to deliver a Vt, a rate is set along with a volume to be delivered with a peep in this case set at +5.  fped-04-00129-g002_figure2This study compared 5 different methods of delivering PPV to a 1 kg preterm manikin.  The first was a standard self inflating bag, the next three different t-piece resuscitators and then the Next Step.  For the first four the goal was to deliver a pressure of 20/5 at a rate of 40-60 breaths per minute.  A test lung was connected to the manikin such that each device was used for a one minute period at three different levels of compliance (0.5 ml/cmH2O, 1.0 ml/cmH2O and then 2.0 ml/cm H2O representing increasing compliance.  The goal of the study was to compare the methods in terms of delivering a volume of 5 mL to this 1 kg model lung.  The order in which the devices were used was randomized for the 25 participants in the study who were all certified in NRP and included some Neonatologists.

Some Concerning Findings

As I said at the beginning, we all like to think we know how to ventilate a newborn with BVM.  The results though suggest that as compliance increases our ability to control how much volume we deliver to a lung based on a best guess for pressures needed is lacking.  One caveat here is that the pressures set on the t-piece resucitators were unchanged during the 1 minute trials but then again how often during one minute would we change settings from a starting point of 20/5?

Vt (mL)
0.5 mL/cmH20 1.0 mL/cmH20 2.0mL/cmH20
Self inflating 11.4 17.6 23.5
Neo-Tee 5.6 11.2 19.3
Neopuff 6.1 10 21.3
Giraffe 5.7 10.9 19.8
Next Step 3.7 4.9 4.5

Without putting in all the confidence intervals I can tell you that the Next Step was the tightest.  What you notice immediately (or at least I did) was that no matter what the compliance, the self inflating bag delivers quite an excessive volume even in experienced hands regardless of compliance.  At low compliance the t-piece resuscitators do an admirable job as 5-6 ml/kg of delivered Vt is reasonable but as compliance improves the volumes increase substantially.  It is worth pointing out that at low compliance the Next Step was unable to deliver the prescribed Vt but knowing that if you had a baby who wasn’t responding to ventilation I would imagine you would then try a setting of 6 ml/kg to compensate much like you would increase the pressure on a typical device. How might these devices do in a 29 week infant for example with better compliance than say a 24 week infant?  You can’t help but wonder how many babies are given minutes of excessive Vt after birth during PPV with the traditional pressure limited BVM setup and then down the road how many have BPD in part because of that exposure.

I wanted to share this piece as I think volume resuscitation will be the future.  This is just a prototype or at least back then it was.  Interestingly in terms of satisfaction of use, the Next Step was rated by the participants in the study as being the easiest and most comfortable to use of all the devices studied.  Adding this finding to the accuracy of the delivered volume and I think we could have a winner.