A real change is coming and with this post you will get a glimpse into where the next big thing in Neonatology is likely to be. A catchy title for sure and also an exaggeration as I don’t see us abandoning the endotracheal tube just yet. There has been a lot of talk about less invasive means of giving surfactant and the last few years have seen several papers relating to giving surfactant via a catheter placed in the trachea (MIST or LISA techniques as examples). There may be a new kid on the block so to speak and that is aerosolized surfactant. This has been talked about for some time as well but the challenge had been figuring out how to aerosolize the fluid in such a way that a significant amount of the surfactant would actually enter the trachea. This was really a dream of many Neonatologists and based on a recently published paper the time may be now for this technique to take off.
A Randomized Trial of Aerosolized Surfacant
Minocchieri et al as part of the CureNeb study team published Nebulised surfactant to reduce severity of respiratory distress: a blinded, parallel, randomised controlled trial. This trial set out to obtain a sample size of 70 patients between 29 0/7 to 33 6/7 weeks to demonstrate a difference in need for intubation from 30% down to 5% in patients treated with CPAP (30% was based on the historical average). The authors recognizing that the babies in this GA bracket might behave differently, further stratified the randomization into two groups being 29 0/7 – 31 6/7 weeks and 32 0/7 to 33 6/7 weeks. Those babies who were on CPAP and met the following criteria for intubation were either intubated in the control group and given surfactant (curosurf) using the same protocol as those nebulized or had surfactant delivered via nebulisation (200 mg/kg: poractant alfa) using a customised vibrating membrane nebuliser (eFlow neonatal). Surfactant nebulisation(100 mg/kg) was repeated after 12 hours if oxygen was still required. The primary dichotomous outcome was the need for intubation within 72 hours of life, and the primary continuous outcome was the mean duration of mechanical ventilation at 72 hours of age.
Criteria for intubation
1. FiO2 >0.35 over more than 30 min OR FiO2 >0.45 at
anytime.
2. More than four apnea/hour OR two apnea requiring BVM
3. Two cap gases with pH <7.2 and PaCO2 >65 mm Hg (or) >60 mm Hg if arterial blood gas sample).
4. Intubation deemed necessary by the attending physician.
Did It Work?
Eureka! It seemed to work as 11 of 32 infants were intubated in the surfactant nebulisation group within 72 hours of birth vs.22 out of 32 infants receiving CPAP alone (RR (95% CI)=0.526 (0.292 to 0.950)). The reduction though was accounted for by the bigger babies in the 32 0/7 to 33 6/7 weeks group as only 1 of 11 was intubated when given nebulized surfactant compared to 10 of 13 managed with CPAP. The duration of ventilation in the first 72 hours was not different between the groups: the median (range) 0 (0–62) hour for the nebulization group and 9 (0–64) hours for the control group (p=0.220). It is important in seeing these results that the clinicians deciding whether infants should be intubated for surfactant administration were blind to the arm the infants were in. All administration of curosurf via nebulization or sham procedures were done behind a screen.
The total number of infants randomized were 66 so they did fall shy of the necessary recruitment but since they did find a difference the results seem valid. Importantly, there were no differences in complications although I can’t be totally confident there really is no risk as this study was grossly underpowered to look at rarer outcomes.
Breaking down the results
This study has me excited as what it shows is that “it kind of works“. Why would larger babies be the ones to benefit the most? My guess is that some but not a lot of surfactant administered via nebulization reaches the alveoli. Infants with lesser degrees of surfactant deficiency (32 0/7 to 33 6/7) weeks might get just enough to manage without an endotracheal tube. Those infants (in particular less than 32 0/7 weeks) who have more significant surfactant deficiency don’t get enough and therefore are intubated. Supporting this notion is the overall delay in time to intubation in those who were intubated despite nebulization (11.6 hours in the nebulization group vs 4.9 hours in the control arm). They likely received some deposition in the distal alveoli but not enough to completely stave off an endotracheal tube.
One concerning point from the study though had to do with the group of infants who were intubated despite nebulization of surfactant. When you look at total duration of ventilation (hours) it was 14.6 (9.0–24.8) in the control arm vs 25.4 (14.6–42.2) p= 0.029*. In other words infants who were intubated in the end spent about twice as long intubated as those who were intubated straight away. Not a huge concern if you are born at 32 weeks or more but those additional thousands of positive pressure breaths are more worrisome as a risk for CLD down the road.
As it stands, if you had an infant who was 33 weeks and grunting with an FiO2 of 35% might you try this if you could get your hands on the nebulizer? It appears to work so the only question is whether you are confident enough that the risk of such things as pneumothorax or IVH isn’t higher if intubation is delayed. It will be interesting to see if this gets adopted at this point.
The future no doubt will see a refinement of the nebulizer and an attempt to see how well this technique works in infants below 29 weeks. It is in this group though that prolonging time intubated would be more worrisome. I don’t want to dismiss this outright as I see this as a pilot study that will lead the way for future work that will refine this technique. If we get this right this would be really transformative to Neonatology and just might be the next big leap.
The modern NICU is one that is full of patients on CPAP these days. As I have mentioned before, the opportunity to intubate is therefore becoming more and more rare is non-invasive pressure support becomes the mainstay of therapy. Even for those with established skills in placing an endotracheal tube, the number of times one gets to do this per year is certainly becoming fewer and fewer. Coming to the rescue is the promise of easier intubations by being able to visualize an airway on a screen using a video laryngoscope. The advantage to the user is that anyone who is watching can give you some great tips and armed with this knowledge you may be better able to determine how to adjust your approach.
For those of you who have followed the blog for some time, you will recall this is not the first time video laryngoscopy has come up. I have spoken about this before in Can Video Laryngoscopy Improve Trainee Success in Intubation. In that piece, the case was made that training residents how to intubate using a video laryngoscope (VL) improves their success rate. An additional question that one might ask though has to do with the quality of the intubation. What if you can place a tube using a video laryngoscope but the patient suffers in some way from having that piece of equipment in the mouth? Lucky for us some researchers from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have completed a study that can help answer this additional question.
Video Laryngoscopy may work but does it cause more harm than good?
Using a video laryngoscope requires purchasing one first and they aren’t necessarily cheap. If they were to provide a better patient experience though the added cost might well be worth it. Pouppirt NR et al published Association Between Video Laryngoscopy and Adverse Tracheal Intubation-Associated Events in the Neonatal Care Unit. This study was a retrospective comparison of two groups; one having an intubation performed with a VL (n=161 or 20% of the group) and the other with a standard laryngoscope (644 or 80% of the group). The study relied on the use of the National Emergency Airway Registry for Neonates (NEAR4NEOs), which records all intubations from a number of centres using an online database and allows for analysis of many different aspects of intubations in neonates. In this case the data utilized though was from their centre only to minimize variation in premedication and practitioner experience.
Tracheal intubation adverse events (TIAEs) were subdivided into severe (cardiac arrest, esophageal intubation with delayed recognition, emesis with witnessed aspiration, hypotension requiring intervention (fluid and/or vasopressors), laryngospasm, malignant hyperthermia, pneumothorax/pneumomediastinum, or direct airway injury) vs non-severe (mainstem bronchial intubation, esophageal intubation with immediate recognition, emesis without aspiration, hypertension requiring therapy, epistaxis, lip trauma, gum or oral trauma, dysrhythmia, and pain and/or agitation requiring additional medication and causing a delay in intubation.
Looking at the patient characteristics and outcomes, some interesting findings emerge.
Patients who had the use of the VL were older and weighed more. They were more likely to have the VL used for airway obstruction than respiratory failure and importantly were also more likely to receive sedation/analgesia and paralysis. These researchers have also recently shown that the use of paralysis is associated with less TIAEs so one needs to bear this in mind when looking at the rates of TIAEs. There were a statistically significant difference in TIAEs of any type of 6% in the VL group to 19% in the traditional laryngoscopy arm but severe TIAEs showed not difference.
Given that several of the baseline characteristics might play a role in explaining why VL seemed superior in terms of minimizing risk of TIAEs by two thirds, the authors performed a multivariable analysis in which they took all factors that were different into account and then looked to see if there was still an effect of the VL despite these seemingly important differences. Interestingly, use of VL showed an Odds ratio of 0.43 (0.21,0.87 95% CI) in spite of these differences.
What does it mean?
Video laryngoscopy appears to make a difference to reducing the risk on TIAEs as an independent factor. The most common TIAE was esophageal intubation at 10% and reducing that is a good thing as it leads to fewer intubation attempts. This was also sen as the first attempt success was 63% in the VL group vs 44% in the other.
Now we need to acknowledge that this was not a randomized controlled trial so it could indeed be that there are other factors that the authors have not identified that led to improvements in TIAEs as well. What makes this study so robust though is the rigour with which the centre documents all of their intubations using such a detailed registry. By using one centre much of the variability in practice between units is eliminated so perhaps these results can be trusted. Would your centre achieve these same results? Maybe not but it would certainly be interesting to test drive one of these for a period of time see how it performs.
I thought I would start off my series of posts with one of the most basic reasons we do Kangaroo Care.
Thermoregulation is the process of maintaining an infant’s temperature within normal range. Thermoregulation is extremely important for the newborn (term or preterm). An infant’s body surface area is 3X greater than an adult’s, causing them to potentially lose heat rapidly, up to 4X faster. When cold stressed, infants use energy and oxygen to generate warmth. Oxygen consumption can increase by as much as 10%. Thermoregulation of the infants allows them to conserve energy and build up *reserves”.
What Happens When An infant Is Placed Skin to Skin?
When the term infant is placed skin to skin at birth, the mother’s breasts immediately start to warm and conduct heat to the infant, helping to maintain normal blood sugar levels due to the infant not having to use their own brown fat to stay warm (Bergstrom et al.,2007;Bystrova et al.,2007;Ludington-Hoe et al.,2000,2006) (Chantry,2005;Christensson et al.,1992).
Kangaroo Care maintains a Neutral Thermal Environment (defined as the ideal setting in which an infant can maintain a normal body temperature while producing only the minimum amount of heat generated from basal life-sustaining metabolic processes).
In our unit, any infant that needs an incubator to maintain their temperature can only come out to be held by Kangaroo Care instead of being bundle held. To help maintain thermoregulation we make sure the infant and parent are in a draft free area, and use 2-4 layers of blankets over the infant (you can always remove a layer if needed). Infants weighing less than 1000gms should wear some type of head cap and monitor them using the incubator’s temperature probe. Remember too, we don’t want any bras or clothing between the infant and the mother, fabric will interfere with the conductance of heat from mother to infant (Ludington-Hoe et al.,2000).
One of the interesting things about KC and thermoregulation is if a mother holds twins in KC each breast works independently to warm each infant (Ludington-Hoe, et al.,2006). Triplets? Not sure, but our mothers hold their “trips” together all the time and we have had no issues.
Now, how about the father? Does he thermoregulate like the mother? With mothers you have what is called Thermal Synchrony (maternal breast temperatures changing in response to the infant’s temperature) (Ludington-Hoe, et al.,1990;1994,2000) where the fathers chests will warm up when the infant is placed in KC but will not cool down (Maastrup & Greisen, 2010). We don’t have any issues with our fathers overheating, just lots of hair to be picked off the infant after!
