Death in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

PURPOSE: Death is an important problem for physicians and parents in neonatal intensive care unit. This study was intended to evaluate the mortality rate, causes of death, and the change of mortality rate by year for infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit. METHODS: We retrospectively surveyed the medical records of the infants who were admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit at Asan Medical Center and who died before discharge between 1998 and 2007. Gestational age, birth weight, gender, time to death and the underlying diseases related to the causes of infant deaths and obtained from the medical records and analyzed according to year. RESULTS: A total of 6,289 infants were admitted and 264 infants died during the study period. The overall mortality rate was 4.2%. For very low and extremely low birth weight infants, the mortality rate was 10.6% and 21.4%, respectively. There was no significant change in the mortality rate during the study period. Prematurity related complications and congenital anomalies were the conditions most frequently associated with death in the neonatal intensive care unit. of the infant deaths 37.1% occurred within the first week of life. CONCLUSION: Even though a remarkable improvement in neonatal intensive care has been achieved in recent years, the overall mortality rate has not changed. To reduce the mortality rate, it is important to control sepsis and prevent premature births. The first postnatal week is a critical period for deaths in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Study on the Effect of Carbon Monoxide Intoxication to Serotonergic Neurons in Midbrain Raphe Nuclei of the Rat

The experimental study was performed to investigate the influence of carbon monoxide on the serotonergic neurons of the raphe nuclei in rat midbrain. For this study, Sprague Dawley rats were intoxicated with 2,000ppm carbon monoxide for 5 hours and serial sections of the midbrain were obtained and stained irnmunohistochemically using anti-serotonin anti sera. The changes in number of serotonergic neurons were analyzed. Total number of serotonergic neurons in rnidbrain of normal rats were 37,977 +/- 1,233.3 After carbon monoxide intoxication, the numbers of serotonergic neurons in midbrain nuclei were 28.138 +/- 3.321.8 CO-intoxication reduced the number of neurons in the midbrain nuclei by 25.9%. Especially diminished the number of B8 cell group by 32.6%.