Abstract
Premature infants who experience prolonged oxygen administration and apnea/bradycardia have an increased incidence of retinopathy of prematurity. Therefore, we predicted and tested the hypothesis that alternating hypoxia and hyperoxia would adversely affect the oxygen induced retinopathy developing after hyperoxic vascular injury in the kitten.
Following 65 hrs of 80% oxygen on day 3 of life, each of 15 litters (67 kittens) were randomly divided between room air recovery and recovery in an incubator where the FiO2 varied from 10% to 43% within each 18 min. period. Fifteen litters would permit us to detect a mean difference in scores of 2 points, α = 0.05, with a power of 80%. After 3 weeks in the recovery phase, the retinopathy was scored on a scale of O (normal) to 13 (worst) by two masked investigators.
The mean retinopathy score from the room air recovered controls in one litter was compared to the mean score from the experimental kittens in the same litter. Unexpectedly, the scores in the experimental group were significantly better than the room air matched littermates, [d = 4.0±3.1, (SD), paired t test, p <0.001] [or Sign test, 14/15 litters were better, p <0.01].
We found that variable oxygenation resulted in a less severe retinopathy than stable oxygenation (room air = 21%) during recovery. The clinical implications of this finding are not known, except to speculate that variable oxygenation may not be a contributing factor to retinopathy of prematurity in the human.
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Phelps, D., Rosenbaum, A. VARIABLE OXYGENATION DURING RECOVERY FROM OXYGEN INDUCED RETINOPATHY IN THE KITTEN. Pediatr Res 18 (Suppl 4), 340 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-198404001-01482
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-198404001-01482