This is good news for many mothers both in Nigeria and all across the world.
A small number of very premature babies are surviving earlier outside the womb than doctors once thought possible, a new study has documented, raising questions about how aggressively they should be treated and posing implications for the debate about abortion.
The study released Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that 5.1 percent of babies born at 22 weeks were able to survive, and 3.4 percent were able to survive without severe impairments.
Most of the variation between hospitals in survival rates is due to how heavily they decide to treat these premature babies.
The study, of thousands of premature births, found that a tiny minority of babies born at 22 weeks who were medically treated survived with few health problems, although the vast majority died or suffered serious health issues.
For most parents and doctors, the new study will intensify the agonizing choices faced about how intensively to treat such infants.
Dr. Edward Bell, a University of Iowa professor who led the study, told The New York Times that he thinks 22 weeks is the new point of viability.
“That’s what we think, but this is a pretty controversial area,” he said. “I guess we would say that these babies deserve a chance.”
“It confirms that if you don’t do anything, these babies will not make it, and if you do something, some of them will make it,” said Dr. David Burchfield, the chief of neonatology at the University of Florida, who was not involved in the research.
“Many who have survived have survived with severe handicaps.”
Results of the study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, are likely to influence a discussion taking place among professional medical associations about how to counsel parents and when to offer treatment to such tiny babies.
But babies born at 22 to 23 weeks are a question mark, their chances for survival slim but varying by things like birth weight and whether the mother received treatment before delivery with corticosteroids that can help a baby’s lungs and brain.
Extremely premature infants born at 22 to 25 weeks of gestation have low rates of survival, and many of those infants who live have severe or moderate neurodevelopmental impairments.
Thus, clinicians and families face the extremely difficult decision to either provide active, potentially lifesaving treatment at birth, or just provide comfort care.
Most premature babies born in Nigeria do not survive. Experts’ findings have revealed that no fewer than 700,000 premature babies are lost every year in the country.
The deaths, due to premature related complications, places Nigeria second after India on the global neonatal mortality ratio of babies that die within 0 – 28 days of birth.
At a walk and lecture, in commemoration of World Prematurity Day (WPD) in Lagos recently, paediatricians noted that the premature birth complications is the leading cause of newborn deaths in Nigeria, because of poor awareness, lack of specialised care and unaffordable cost of managing a preterm baby for most families.
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