Repeated steroid dosages linked to cerebral palsy among premature infants
The risk of cerebral palsy in unborn premature babies can be increased due to repeated courses of a corticosteroid called betamethasone, which is presently indicated to improve the survival of babies.
The finding was disclosed as per results from a multi-center study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and led by Ronald Wapner, M.D., professor of obstetrics and gynecology, Columbia University Medical Center and attending obstetrician and gynecologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia.
From News-Medical.Net:
The study results were published in an issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
In one of the first such trials to examine the long-term effects of the treatment on the children, women who remained pregnant a week after the initial course of corticosteroids were randomly assigned to weekly courses of corticosteroids or placebo until their babies were born.
The study, performed by members of the NIH-sponsored Maternal-Fetal Medicine Network followed a total of 556 infants at the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia and 12 other sites around the country, and found that by ages two to three, the two groups of children were physically and neurologically identical, except that six out of 248 children who received multiple courses of corticosteroids had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, compared to only 1 out of 238 children in the placebo group. The mothers of all six children with cerebral palsy in the corticosteroid group had received four or more courses of the drug.
Dr. Wapner remarked that doctors must not administer multiple weekly courses of corticosteroids as weekly courses had no benefits in the long term and corticosteroids can potentially harm the child.
