Drug fails to help premature infants
Drug fails to help premature infants
A drug treatment designed to prevent mental retardation, learning disabilities, and cerebral palsy in premature infants may be ineffective, according to a nationwide study.
The treatment, which involves giving pregnant women phenobarbital, was supposed to reduce the likelihood of bleeding in the brain, a complication of birth that can lead to a host of mental problems for a baby.
In a test of 610 women who seemed likely to give birth prematurely in their seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, half were given phenobarbital injections while the rest got a placebo.
The research team, led by Seetha Shankaran, MD, of Wayne State University in Detroit, discovered that the phenobarbital injections had no effect on the risk of brain bleeding. It still occurred in about one of every four infants.
The treatment "simply provides no benefit for the baby," says Linda Wright of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Develop ment, which helped pay for the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Earlier research had suggested that phenobarbital might help premature babies, but those studies involved fewer babies, and some of the women in the experiments had not been given a placebo in place of the drug.
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