Leighton is a premature baby who was born with barely 23 weeks of gestation and the prognosis about its survival was not too encouraging. With that gestational age the survival rate is between 20 and 35 percent.
With only 760 grams of weight He had little chance of getting ahead, but doctors decided to use a novel technique to treat babies who come into the world too soon: put it inside a plastic bag full of oxygen It works like a kind of artificial uterus.
The boy clung to life and managed to get ahead against all odds. Today is a healthy baby of eight months who grows without sequelae derived from prematurity. Thanks to this procedure, the baby born in Perth (Australia) 17 weeks ahead of schedule, could develop your lungs until they were ripe to allow him to breathe on his own.
In Babies and more, they manage to carry a premature sheep into an artificial uterus, again An artificial uterus tested in lambs
The technique is new in humans, but it had already been tested in animals. In April 2017, the news jumped that a group of researchers had managed to get a premature born sheep to develop until it came to term in a bag that worked like an artificial uterus.
The system was tested to implement it with great premature babies like Leighton, that is babies born before the 28th week of gestation. The baby is born by caesarean section and is introduced into a completely sterile bag to which the oxygen that the baby needs to continue advancing in its gestation is connected. The bag protects the baby from suffering from neonatal hypothermia, one of the most common complications in premature infants because its body temperature regulation system is still immature.
In Babies and moreThe story of "Emilín the warrior", a great premature of 23 weeks of gestation that has come forward without sequelaeThe next step, an essay that researchers from the University of West Australia are developing, is to fill the bag with amniotic fluid and keep it connected to an artificial placenta.
As we can see in the video above, the baby was not permanently isolated in the bag, but his mother made the Kangaroo Method by keeping it in skin-to-skin contact, a very beneficial practice for premature babies that helps them regulate body temperature , heart rate and promote breastfeeding.
Every year 15 million premature babies are born in the world and this new technique could help many of them succeed.
