Active clinical trials for "Neonatal Sepsis"

The objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of empiric treatment with cefazolin versus to vancomycin in newborn infants with presumptive clinical signs of hospital acquired bacterial sepsis probably caused by Coagulase-negative staphylococcus. The investigators hypothesized that newborn infants with the presumptive diagnosis of nosocomial sepsis who received cefazolin as empiric treatment would have a clinical outcome not inferior to that of those treated with vancomycin.

Newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), especially premature ones with immature organ systems, frequently suffer nosocomial infections caused by microorganisms resistant to narrow-spectrum antibiotics like ampicillin and gentamicin and require introduction of new agents with a wider spectrum of activity. Meropenem has activity against wide variety of Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. It is well tolerated by children and neonates, including preterm babies, and allowing monotherapy instead of combined therapy. Severe neonatal infections with increasing antibiotic resistance are major problems affecting morbidity and mortality in the NICU. Few number of new antibacterial agents entering the clinic and new agents for multi-drug resistant Gram-negative bacteria will unlikely be available in the near future.

Sepsis has its greatest impact in the prematurely born (preterm) population. Neonatal sepsis (sepsis within the first month of life) causes over one million deaths worldwide annually, and is one of the most common, difficult and costly problems to diagnose, treat and prevent. The preterm infant can suffer rates of sepsis up to 1000-fold higher than the full-term infant, and bears the brunt of the associated mortality and lifelong sepsis-survivor morbidity. The project is enabled by several novel, validated, microfluidic technologies that are robust and easy to use with little training. These technologies provide comprehensive measures of the functionality of blood PMN population; a critical cellular component of innate immunity. The study team will also extract high-quality nucleic acids from microfluidic-sorted PMNs for transcriptomic analyses. Collectively, these techniques require a total of 250 microliters (µL) of blood, which makes them particularly useful for preterm infants where sample volume is limited, and facilitates serial assessments with unprecedented temporal resolution of key functions of PMNs. These studies, integrated with bioinformatics approaches, will generate new tools for diagnosing sepsis in the newborn and predicting clinical outcomes. Such approaches have the capability to dramatically change the clinical management of the preterm infant, and potentially improve long-term outcomes while reducing hospital costs.

Study comprises of giving IVIG to half of the septic VLBW preterm neonates along with ongoing antibiotics and placebo to the other half. The immunoglobulin will be given for 3 days and neonates will be monitored for the results. The data will be analysed on the basis of blood culture results and outcome of the patients.

This trial evaluates primary care clinic-based simplified antibiotic therapy options for young infants, 0-59 days old in high neonatal mortality settings in peri-urban Karachi where hospital referral is frequently refused by families.

Majority of healthcare authorities believe that due to the methodological weakness and small number of patients in conducted therapeutic trials, the evidences are insufficient to support the efficacy of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) in prevention of preterm neonatal sepsis. The objective of this research is to determine the effect of intravenous immunoglobulin in prevention of preterm neonatal sepsis.

Though maternal and neonatal health are high priority areas for international development, maternal and neonatal mortality remain unacceptably high. Worldwide there are 1 million maternal and 4 million neonatal deaths every year and half of them occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Post-partum and neonatal severe bacterial infections, namely sepsis, are leading causes of maternal and neonatal deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. Newborns can be infected during labour - when passing through the birth canal - and also during the first days/weeks of life, as a consequence of the close physical contact with the mother, when the latter carriers bacteria. As the mother is an important source of bacterial transmission to the newborn, treating mothers with antibiotics during labour should decrease their bacterial carriage and therefore lower transmission to the newborn. As carriage is a necessary step towards severe disease, this intervention should in turn result in the lower occurrence of severe bacterial disease and mortality during the neonatal period. In many high-income countries, pregnant women are screened during pregnancy for vaginal carriage of Group B Streptococcus, the bacteria responsible for the vast majority of neonatal sepsis in the developed world. If women are carriers, they are treated with intravenous antibiotics during labour to decrease the risk of severe disease to their off-spring. Although this intervention has been successful in developed countries, infrastructure and resource limitations in regions like sub-Saharan Africa prevent both screening and use of intravenous antibiotics. Also, in Africa several bacterial pathogens are responsible for neonatal sepsis and the antibiotics needed in the continent should cover a wider number of bacteria; and ideally cover also bacteria responsible for severe post-partum disease in the mother. We will conduct a large trial in West Africa, The Gambia and Burkina Faso, with the main objective of determining if a single dose of an oral antibiotic given to women during labour decreases newborn mortality. The trial will also assess the effect of the antibiotic on lowering newborns and maternal hospitalization during the first week's post-partum. We have selected an antibiotic (azithromycin) that in sub-Saharan Africa has already been used for elimination of other prevalent diseases such as trachoma. This antibiotic is safe, requires a single oral administration, has no special storage requirements and has the potential to eliminate most of the bacteria commonly causing severe disease in newborns and post-partum women in the continent. Very important this antibiotic is not widely used in clinical care in the continent, and therefore, any temporal increase of resistance induced by the intervention should not have implications on current treatment guidelines. Before going to the large trial proposed here (12,000 women to be recruited), we have generated robust preliminary data on the effect of the intervention in a proof-of-concept trial conducted in The Gambia (829 women and their offspring recruited). We found that in fact, babies born from mothers who had taken this antibiotic during labour were less likely to carry bacteria that can potentially cause severe disease. These babies were also three times less likely to have bacterial skin infections or umbilical infections, both highly common among African newborns. Besides, fever or mastitis (again both very common in the region) during the post-partum period were four times lower among mothers who had taken the antibiotic during labour. Such trial confirmed our hypothesis of impact on bacterial transmission but it was too small to assess the effect of the antibiotic on mortality and hospitalizations. The preliminary trial also showed that women from the azithromycin group were less likely to need antibiotics for treatment infections during the puerperal period, decreasing then the pressure on the scarcity of antibiotics available in the continent. The advantages of our approach are its simplicity, low cost and the possibility of protecting both mothers and babies with the same intervention.

The protective effect of mother's milk and colostrum on oropharyngeal cavity is not achievable with gavage feeding. This may be increase the risk of colonization of the oropharyngeal cavity with pathogenic bacteria and subsequent increase in the risk of neonatal sepsis. We aim to study the impact of Oropharyngeal Administration of Mother's Milk (OPAMM) before gavage feeding on clinical outcome, bacterial colonization of the GIT of preterm infants with pathogenic bacteria. We also aim to study the immune-protective effect of OPAMM on the incidence of nosocomial sepsis.

Unnecessary and prolonged antibiotic therapy in newborn babies can have serious consequences including development of necrotizing enterocolitis (a serious, potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal illness in premature babies), late-onset infections, resistance to antibiotics, increased length of hospital stay, and death. Starting and continuing antibiotic therapy for blood culture-negative infections in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is fairly common with numbers of such patients varying from 20%-90% of infants undergoing a sepsis evaluation in the NICU. While blood culture results are the gold standard, there is usually a delay of up to 48-72h before the results are known. Hence, initiation and continuation of antibiotic treatment are usually based on clinical evaluation and blood count criteria which do not possess high specificity or sensitivity, and may be unreliable in the first few hours after birth or in the early stages of infection. Since the investigators found that neutrophil CD64 (a type of protein found on the surface of a type of white blood cell that can be detected quickly in a very small amount of blood sample) has high accuracy for early detection of blood culture-proven infections in newborn babies, with extremely high negative predictive value (can identify babies definitively with no infection), the investigators will use this test to decide whether to stop or continue antibiotics in the NICU. The investigators hypothesis is that neutrophil CD64 values can be safely used to discontinue antibiotics in newborns suspected of having infections. The investigators aims are to utilize sequential measurements of CD64 values to stop antibiotics early in neonates being investigated for both early and late-onset infections in the NICU. This is a prospective, randomized, controlled (RCT) trial. The study population will be derived from the sub-set of all newborn infants who have undergone investigations for presence of infection in the NICU.

The purpose of this study was to see if a brief delay in cord clamping for 30 to 45 seconds would result in higher hematocrit levels, fewer transfusions, healthier lungs, and better motor function at 40 wks and 7 months of age.