Blood test could help treat babies starved of oxygen

sCiEnCE Editor

A SIMPLE blood test can show how to treat babies who were starved of oxygen before or during birth.

About 1,625 of the 650,000 babies born annually in Britain suffer from hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE), which can result in conditions such as cerebral palsy, epilepsy, deafness or blindness.

Treatment that usually involves whole-body cooling – therapeutic hypothermia – can help prevent death and disability, but in some cases has been shown to increase mortality risks.

Now a team of scientists at Imperial College has discovered that oxygen starvation can either happen over a long period of time – because of maternal stress, poor nutrition or infection in pregnancy – or as a result of an incident such as maternal bleeding. While cooling is likely to work for the latter, it may be more dangerous for the oxygen depletions for longer periods.

A new blood test developed by Imperial can pick up the cause of the brain damage by looking at genetic markers.

The team made the breakthrough after realising babies in low-income countries such as India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were not getting well from the cooling treatment, which suggested that their brain injuries may have a different cause.

There was a dramatic divergence in gene expression between the babies and those in high-income countries such as Britain, suggesting a different underlying cause of brain injury.

Before the development of therapeutic hypothermia, about a quarter of affected newborn babies were likely to die from lack of oxygen to the brain, while the 75 per cent that survived were at risk of severe disability.

The findings, published in the journal could eventually lead to a simple test to quickly diagnose brain injury in newborns and help with treatment decisions.