Abstract
Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is the most common serious acquired disease of the gastrointestinal tract in preterm infants. Although it can occur in full-term neonates, almost 90% of all cases occur in premature infants. Both incidence and case fatality rates increase with decreasing birth weight and gestational age. The majority of cases occur in very low birth weight infants with an incidence of approximately 6 to 7%. In ELBW infants reported NEC rates range between 10 and 11%.
Highlights
Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is the most common serious acquired disease of the gastrointestinal tract in preterm infants [1]
The pathogenesis of NEC remains incompletely understood, but it is probably a heterogeneous disease resulting from multiple factors that result in mucosal injury in a susceptible host [8,9,10]
A subgroup analysis was performed for extremely low birth weight (ELBW) infants, 89 infants in the control group and 98 infants in the treatment group
Summary
Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is the most common serious acquired disease of the gastrointestinal tract in preterm infants [1]. It can occur in full-term neonates, almost 90% of all cases occur in premature infants [2]. Factors implicated in the pathogenesis of NEC include prematurity, enteral feeding, microbial bowel overgrowth, impaired mucosal defence, excessive inflammation, circulatory instability of the intestinal tract and medications that cause intestinal mucosal injury or enhance microbial overgrowth [2,7,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. Antenatal corticosteroids are associated with a reduction in NEC [29,30]
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