Prenatal Care and Incubation

Prenatal diagnoses have become a key tool of the modern obstetrics at the present time, to detect both maternal problems as well as fetal ones. The advances of the means of diagnosis through image, such as the ultrasound, and in the future the magnetic nuclear resonance applied to the pregnant mother, both associated to the test of confirmation of well-being and fetal normality, allow the very precocious detection of anomalies and even the intra-uterine fetal treatments. 

When the causes that can cause the prematurity are known, which doesn't always happen, and they have a merely mechanical or functional origin, such as cervical incompetence or placenta problems, resting and the pharmacological measures will help to avoid contractions and eventual births before the prospective date. In other cases, when there is an infection in the placenta and the liquid that covers and surrounds the baby, analytical and bacteriological observation should be very highlighted on since the risk factor acquires other dimensions that will call for antibiotics, which will be absolutely necessary in these cases. By forcing the obstetric pathology, multiple pregnancies present higher chances of premature incidences, with the added risk an inferior weight of the twins.

When there is the threat of a premature birth, modern obstetrics highlights only cited measures, but also try to accelerate the maturity of the baby’s organs while it is still in the uterus, since the biggest danger for these babies lies in their lack of preparation to adapt to life outside of the mother’s womb.

It is evident that for the time being means don't exist to mature all the organs functionally, but it can attempt with what is important for the doctors at the moment of the birth: the lungs. It is well known that a baby that achieves the correct exchange of oxygen exchange after being born has a smaller risk of having sequels. 

Lung maturity is achieved with corticoids administration to the mother with a risk of premature childbirth, when she is in between weeks twenty-four and thirty three weeks of gestation. This is one of the most important advances, fruit of the existence of a new scientific discipline: perinatology that has generated an exchange of information between obstetricians and neonatal pediatricians. The mother and the baby, from this new perspective, are not considered separate units but a single functional unit, which is why in many countries around the world there are centers of integral attention that exist for mothers that are at high risk and where they can go to before the birth takes place.

Once born, the baby is then taken to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the parents are then suddenly forced to adapt to the new situation, trying to accept the reality of the baby’s problem and overcoming the impact of all the apparatuses of the NICU.

The premature baby is then placed in thermal cribs or incubators that control automatically control the heat administered according to the thermal necessities that the baby requires. The monitors register and watch the heartbeat, breathing, temperature, arterial pressure and the levels of oxygen and carbonic anhydride, but by means of non-invasive systems, meaning that are not painful for the baby. At the same time, in the case of babies that have difficulties breathing, due to their immaturity or because they lack enough strength to carry out these movements, can have placed a respirator that has the complexity which allows it to produce the smallest amount of damage possible to the breathing passages. Not in vain, one of the most frequent complications in this sense has been denominated as chronic lung illness, sequel of the assisted ventilation and of oxygen therapy that causes many problems in the first two years of life.