Prevention may be key to treating birth injury cases

New York physicians and medical professionals may agree that prevention is the best course of treatment for just about any serious injury or illness, but determining the exact warming signs of a particular medical condition can be especially challenging. And in cases involving pediatric patients, correctly identifying and treating birth injury incidents often poses unique challenges to doctors. That is why more emphasis is being placed on investigating the causes of serious birth injuries so that physicians can develop more accurate and effective treatment methods.

Properly recognizing and treating brain injuries in newborn babies can be especially difficult for pediatricians because signs and symptoms may not present themselves until during or after birth, or even later in many cases. Even so, advances in medicine and technology have come a long way to help diagnose and treat neonatal brain injuries. For example, physicians can now rely on more accurate brain imaging devices to help determine how severe a brain injury is and when it was sustained. Beyond that, the long-term effects of a neonatal brain injury may be minimized if the patient is treated with neonatal hypothermia, cooling the baby’s body down for a set amount of time.

Of course, such medical treatments can only be truly effective if they are administered in a timely and appropriate manner. It’s for that reason that two leading medical organizations are encouraging pediatricians to be more proactive in diagnosing and treating neonatal brain injuries to avoid serious medical errors. The two groups recently published updated guidelines for pediatricians and obstetricians, encouraging physicians to identify all possible causes for brain injuries in neonatal patients. By recognizing that neonatal brain injuries can occur prior to birth and may depend on numerous factors, physicians hope that they can identify trends and develop more effective preventative treatments.

Source: medicalexpress.com, “Spotting cause of newborn brain injury could aid prevention, report says,” April 3, 2014